Bethany Hagen's Blog

!!!

Okay, so brief backstory here:  I had the chance to meet the hilarious Leah Rae Miller through a group of author moms on Facebook.  Turned out that we are music twins! (in addition to sharing a ton of political and literary perspectives.)  We both love Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Fiona Apple, and we’ll exchange good writing music from time to time.  Leah is one of the most genuinely intelligent, funny and warm people I’ve had the honor of meeting, and I couldn’t be more excited for her debut, coming May 7th, 2013.

The incomparable Leah!

Born and raised in northern Louisiana, Leah Rae Miller still lives there on a windy hill with her husband and kids. She loves comic books, lava lamps, fuzzy socks, and Cherry Coke. She spends most of her days reading things she likes and writing things she hopes other people will like.

Now, in case you need a refresher on The Summer I Became A Nerd:

On the outside, seventeen-year-old Madelyne Summers looks like your typical blond cheerleader—perky, popular, and dating the star quarterback. But inside, Maddie spends more time agonizing over what will happen in the next issue of her favorite comic book than planning pep rallies with her squad. That she’s a nerd hiding in a popular girl’s body isn’t just unknown, it’s anti-known. And she needs to keep it that way.

Summer is the only time Maddie lets her real self out to play, but when she slips up and the adorkable guy behind the local comic shop’s counter uncovers her secret, she’s busted. Before she can shake a pom-pom, Maddie’s whisked into Logan’s world of comic conventions, live-action role-playing, and first-person-shooter video games. And she loves it. But the more she denies who she really is, the deeper her lies become…and the more she risks losing Logan forever.

________________________________________________________

I know, right?  *grabby hands*

Ready. For. The. Cuteness?

ADORBS.

_____________________________________________________

Pre-order Links:

Amazon- http://www.amazon.com/Summer-I-Became-Nerd/dp/1620612380/

BN.com- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-summer-i-became-a-nerd-leah-rae-miller/1113610315

Additional Links:

Goodreads- http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14744489-the-summer-i-became-a-nerd

Twitter- https://twitter.com/LeahR_Miller

Website/blog- http://leahraemillerblog.blogspot.com/

Be sure to catch the Marked-to-Read contest on Goodreads in the weeks leading up to THE SUMMER I BECAME A NERD’s release on May 7, 2013. Watch Leah’s site, http://leahraemillerblog.blogspot.com/, for details on how to submit/enter to win, because I know you’re just as excited as I am!

My littlest little, Teagan the 19 month old, starts “preschool” this week.  And I am le sad.

I know that she’ll have fun; she loves people and songs and books and playtimes.  And the school–the toddler counterpart to my son’s Montessori preschool–couldn’t be better.  I know that she’ll learn lots and make friends.  I know that on the days that I don’t work at the library, I’ll be able to write and hopefully cut out the number of nights I work in Starbucks until midnight, freezing and yawning and listening to off-key homeless banjo playing.

I know she won’t resent me for having two jobs, for working to further my career, for choosing a safe place for her to explore learning and new faces.

I know this is the next stage for our family.

I know all babies grow up, even dimple-cheeked, feisty blond ones.

I wonder if other women have as fraught of a relationship with their house as I do.  It seems like most of my other friends are able to effortlessly juggle work, children and their housework without breaking a sweat.  Or, if they’re not able to get to the laundry or the dishes or the suspicious stain on the carpet, they’re able to brush it aside.  Leave it for another day.  Go to bed without feeling like The House is staring at them with bright red eyes while they sleep.

These other magical women.

I, however, feel like The House is always following me around like a diseased parrot digging its talons into my shoulder.  The dishes!  The laundry!  The floors!  Those cats I used to love but now regard as burden of litter-boxing and feeding!  No matter how much I clean, it never feels like enough, and whenever I’m doing something else–babysitting, playing with my own kids, collapsed on the couch–I feel like I’m shirking my duties as a part-time SAHM/WrAHM/what have you.  This has become an issue in the last few weeks because, with my son off to preschool, I thought that meant I could use my daughter’s nap-times to write (if I didn’t take a nap myself.)  But so far, I just spend that extra free hour cleaning.

There’s no reason for me to feel this way.  My stepmother worked two jobs while my father sorted/washed/folded all the laundry and made meals once or twice a week.  My own mother stayed home, but was not particularly domestic.  In fact, growing up in my mother’s house should have inured me to all forms of mess.  I supposedly come from a generation of educated women who’ve grown up with more equal opportunities and less gender stereotypes than any generation before it.  So why do I feel like I’m letting my husband and children down if my house doesn’t look like a 1957 Redbook advertisment?

I didn’t always used to be so racked with messy house guilt.  When my husband and I first got married, and the sum of my responsibilities was an education from a state university and a part-time job shelving books/napping in the staff room at a library, I didn’t really give a crap how our apartment looked.  I still did most of the cleaning because I felt like that was my way to contribute, since I wasn’t contributing financially, but none of the chores ever haunted me.  I didn’t find myself wondering about a leftover load of laundry in the washing machine at parties.  I didn’t spend my drive to school wishing I used my morning to sweep and mop.  I maintained the apartment to the point that rats wouldn’t live in our closet, and that was good enough.  I had other things to do after all–watch Lost, and procrastinate on other things so that I could watch Lost.

No, I didn’t morph into a clean freak until after my son was born.  And then my brain split apart, and my eyes went red and a voice said, “There is no Bethany.  Only Clorox.”

Why do I feel the need to be Suzy Homemaker?  When I’m educated and modern and married to an educated, modern man?  Do our cultural roots go so deep, that unconsciously I associate good motherhood with the image of a woman in an apron scrubbing her toilet?  Or is there something biological in my mama bird brain that demands an organized nest?

In an effort to curb myself before I fritter all my time away wiping baseboards, I am resolving to Beat Back the House Guilt.  Go away, House!  You have no power here!  Not when there is writing to be written and books to be read and husbands to steal bites of pie from!

After three years, two major revisions (which each time involved deleting about 40,000 words,) and a more normalized revision with fleshing out characterization, world building and narrative threads, Landry Park is now in the hands of my critique partners.  While I’m waiting for their disgust suggestions, I am working on other things.

At first I thought I would just flesh out notes on some ideas that have been swirling around in my brain for quite a while.  Three years is a long time to work on one project (although much of that was taken up with school, and gestating and birthing two babies) and even though I am religiously monomaniacal about finishing a project I’ve started, my brain tends to wander after that much time.  Plus, as a mom, I have a lot of dead time in the car, or while the kids smash Play-Doh into the walls, or while I’m waiting for my son to finish on the potty.

That’s right.  When you have a toddler, hours of your life will be dedicated to watching someone poop. Waiting for them to poop.  Begging them to poop so you can go check on dinner or the infant that’s started pulling laundry out of the hamper.

But, when I started fleshing out notes, the stories started getting more compelling.  The characters became more vivid.  And I could resist opening a new Scrivener file and starting.  And after gut-wrenching revisions, filled with massive cuts and hours of fine-tuning and fiddling, the feeling of a blank screen and infinite possibility was amazing.

In drafting land, there are no mistakes.  There are few agonies and even fewer minor frustrations.  You are walking along with your main character, learning as they learning, meeting new people as they meet them.  I love this part, just spending time with your protagonist, because on the long road ahead, you need these happy memories to keep going.  It’s a lot like marriage, really.  Or watching a tiny person poop.

…why it is next to impossible for me to get anything done when my kids are awake, I’ll share a little scene from tonight.  So I had eaten some bad Chinese food, which is something I do periodically to myself out of self-loathing, and was predictably sick afterwards.  Luckily, the baby was in her crib asleep, but my toddler son was wide awake.  I turned on Nick Jr. to distract him, and shivered my way through some stomach cramps on the floor.

So, once a month, there’s this time when I take lots of ibuprofen and tylenol, and I’ve told my son that it was for my tummy.  He got really jealous about my tummy medicine and started BEGGING for “tummy medicine” night and day.  Finally, out of sheer desperation, I gave him some fish oil and told him it was tummy medicine.  He stopped complaining and now he asks for an extra dose of DHA a few times a week.  Win/win?

Except, tonight when I was curled in a ball, sweating and retching into a bowl, he took it upon himself to give me “tummy medicine.”  He even broke open the capsule so that all the dead fish goodness could ooze into my mouth that much faster.  Since I was sick, fish oil sounded like the last thing in the world I wanted to taste, but my son stood in front of me AND WATCHED ME SWALLOW IT like I was Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted.  I choked it down, because he was being so sweet and concerned, and then was sick again.

Then–and I am not joking–he raised up my head and said completely seriously, “Mommy, I want you to run in circles.”  And I answered, also completely seriously, “No.”  Then he started yelling, “PLEASE RUN IN CIRCLES PLEASE RUN IN CIRCLES PLEASE RUN IN CIRCLES,” and I was terrified that he was going to wake the baby and then I’d have two crazy kids to deal with while I was vomiting while my husband was working the evening shift.  So I ran in circles with the bowl in front of me.

Then he starts whipping at my ankles with a pajama shirt, roaring, “Faster! Faster!” like we’re in the Bataan death march, and trying to jump on my back like he’s Bella Swan from Twilight and I’m Edward, about to run through the trees.  I did this until my husband got home and I could go die in the bathroom in peace.

My life as a mom is so busy and so staggeringly insane that it’s a miracle I get even manage to get dressed or take out the trash or remember to say “hello” to my husband every day.  Although things would probably be easier if I laid off the Chinese food.