Author: beckylevine

A couple of months ago, our wonderful cat, Lacey, died. I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, and this loss was the biggest–I don’t remember ever missing another cat quite so much after they were gone. So I “knew” it would be a bit before I/we’d be ready to bring another cat into our homes, and–as I do–I made a plan. We have a lot of traveling to do, little short trips, in the next 4-5 months, so I said…okay, no new kitty until Spring. The guys–as they do when it comes to pet questions–agreed with me.

BUT…Missing Lacey so much has translated into just missing having a cat around. Maybe it’s because we’re in Autumn, with Winter coming right around the corner. I mean, Winter. You’re supposed to have a cat on your lap, right? When my husband added a set of cupboards and little shelves along one kitchen wall, a few years ago, he set the bottom shelf “Lacey-high” above the floor, because that’s where one of the heater vents is, and, obviously, Lacey needed to be able to curl up under that shelf. Which she did.

That heater vent is being completely wasted right now.

So, I said to the guys, “Spring, Schming. Right after Thanksgiving, we’re going to the kitty shelter. We’re going to sit down in the kitty room and see who adopts us. And we’re going to bring that kitty home.” The guys…agreed.

But here’s the thing. I have never, never, NEVER gone and got a cat. I counted up the other day, and in the 18 years before I left my parents’ home, I was part-owner and co-habitor with at least twelve cats. Here’s the list (Siblings, feel free to add more in the comments if I’ve forgotten anyone!): Henry, Moses, Tommy, Freddy, Frankie, Callie, Flopsy, Mopsy (Later renamed Lily), Cottontail, Peter, Rye Krisp, Rocky Road (We got tired of my parents naming every pet we had with an -ie or -y ending name!) Dog friends, don’t get worried, we had four dogs in that time (Five? Can’t remember when they got Patrick the Chihuahua, no comments, please!), a couple of canaries, a guinea pig, and I believe a couple of salamanders. And fish.

We bought the canaries and the guinea pig, I think. There may have been some small amount of money exchanged for the first three dogs. But cats? My parents were veterinarians with their own vet hospital. Cats came to them. To us. Pick out a cat? Unheard of.

When I met my husband, he’d had two cats, both of whom had also come to him. Cat (I know!) and Fred. Fred was still around when I showed up, and he was an awesomely cranky cat who actually liked me: Bonus points with the then-boyfriend!

And Lacey found us. She showed up one day in the front yard of our mountain home–clean, well-fed, cuddly, not in the least bit feral, and she climbed into my son’s five-year-old lap and stayed there. My husband says that maybe, if we wait, another clean, well-fed, cuddly, not in the least bit feral cat will show up. I say, no, I’m pretty sure that was Lacey Magic.

So we will go to the shelter and pick out a cat.

Do you know HOW MANY CATS will be at that shelter? It’ll be like this:

I really, really, really want just one cat. We are a very good one-cat family. I know, I know, and I’m not standing on a box and shouting “NO!” to two cats, but still, how in the world do you pick?! How do you walk out with one fuzzball under your arm and leave the others behind?

Tips? Suggestions? Awesome stories? The comments are yours!

So I’ve got a little more time these days. One job ended and, while I’m working to discover the next one and what it will be, I’ve got time for other things. Like more writing. Which is good.

As long as I use it.

Sudden changes can be…sudden. And disruptive. We can focus too narrowly on one task, the one that seems to shout TOP PRIORITY at us, while tucking the other, equally important, pieces of our lives into a corner. I think I’ve done that for the past couple of weeks. Plus, then, there was the cold. Which wasn’t bad enough to keep me from focusing on those “priority” items, but told me it was too much for my creativity. I let myself listen. For a little while, that was okay. Adjustments take…adjusting.

But now it’s time to write. And to look at some goals. I have some more writing time. How do I want to use it? Typically, unsurprisingly, the novel is calling. This extra time I have now is undefined–it could disappear at any moment; it could last for a while. And that “while,” makes me feel like falling into long stretches of early drafting. It makes me feel like immersing myself in characters and moments that build, over pages, to bigger moments. It sounds relaxing, attractive.

I’m saying “no.” I’m saying, “Hey, you have picture books you’ve been trying to Finish.” Part of the call to the longer manuscript is fear; I know this. If I look realistically at where life is right now, I DO have time to finish those picture books. I have time to put in the real work, the committed and focused minutes and hours. Which means…Gulp. Setting to it and doing it. Facing all the quibbles and false starts and WTHs and pushing through them to the other side. Yeah: Fear.

It’s another time when I have to ask myself, “Hey, Becks, what is it you actually want?” And while one of those wants is, sure, to just lose myself in writing and writing and writing, there’s another big one that needs to be attended to. That Big Want is: I want to complete some more projects, I want to submit them, and I want to see what happens. I want to give myself that chance to have my books picked up and possibly, hopefully, end up on a publisher’s schedule and in a reader’s hands. Many readers’ hands.

So it’s picture books first. It’s commitment and determination and focus the projects I’ve brought this far for a reason. It’s getting past the fear and through to the love.

What’s at the top of your writing-to-do list this month?

Words have power. As writers and, heck, as people, we all know that. I will get into an argument with anyone who dismisses a person’s right to choose their own name, their own identity, their own cultural definition. I’ll get into a BIG argument with anyone who doesn’t see the power claimed by those who call themselves “Right to Lifers,” as though those of us who support a woman’s right to choose are anti-life.

Ahem. Okay, that went off on a tangent. But, still, words=power. Yes? Yes.

So I’ve been making my way through a book by Walpola Rahula called What the Buddha Taught. I had been looking for a book that talked about the things the Buddha actually/supposedly said, one without too much interpretation of “translation” or too-heavy layer of spirituality. My meditation teacher recommended Rahula’s book. I’m liking it. It’s a bit slow-going, but it’s nice and basic and clear and has almost a sweet voice to it. There are lots of little details that make me pause and think and have a kind of mm-hmm moment. Like this:

According to Buddhism there are two sorts of understanding: What we generally call understanding is knowledge, an accumulated memory, an intellectual grasping of a subject according to certain given data. This is called ‘knowing accordingly’ (anubodhd). It is not very deep. Real deep understanding is called ‘penetration’ (paivedha), seeing a thing in its true nature, without name and label. This penetration is possible only when the mind is free from all impurities and is fully developed through meditation.”

So, to dissect a moment: Yes, I get the irony of assigning words (labels!) to different kinds of knowledge, in the same sentence as the author sort of dismisses names and labels as unimportant. As I talked about above, I think words and labels have power and, while letting go of any attachment to that power may be the point here, it’s not a point I’ve reached. Obviously. Separate from that debate, though, are a couple of things that hit me strongly about this passage. First, when I was young (okay, maybe still today–sometimes), I felt some inferiority around people who had a lot of what the author here calls anubodhd. As a child who immersed herself in fiction and imagination, I didn’t have a lot of facts at my fingerprints, and even when I thought I did, I’d get myself in an emotional tangle trying to defend my small grasp of them. I was much happier outside the world of facts, but I still often felt a lack, somehow, a shortcoming, without them. I don’t know that I agree with the author’s assessment of one kind of knowledge being less deep than the other, but I am in complete agreement that there are two distinct types. And it’s taken me years to recognize that I have some strength in the other, in paivedha. Whether it’s from all those years of fiction reading (yes, I know, it’s what we all want to believe!), or whether it’s because of my original brain chemistry, or a combination of both, I am better at paivadha than at anubodhd. Thank goodness, right? Because how else would I write?

But I think what I’m getting at most of all is that seeing “my” kind of knowledge recognized on this page, in a language and vocabulary and teaching that have been around pretty much forever, felt good. Warming. And again, despite the irony and the attachment-problem, let me just tell you how much I love that paivedha has been given its own label. Its own power.

Words. I think I’ll keep them.

Yes, my trees that change color are starting their shift. The temps are cooler (although I’m still watching for that last heat-wave we typically get before Halloween). This morning we were hit with gusts of wind–the kind that blow the leaves off the tree (and, unfortunately, the remaining pollen into my eyes). All these things feel the same.

But this year is different. For me, autumn is typically a time of slowing down. Or at least feeling more calm and quiet. I’m sure it’s something about heading into winter. And I tend to want to rush through summer, to get through the heat and all that extra summer activity (which, while fun, isn’t always my speed). So when autumn hits, I feel like I made it, like we can all move into a quieter mode and just sort of be for a while.

Except, you know, my son is in his last year of High School.

Yes, I’m going on about this. Yes, everyone experiences it. No, I’m not special. But, hey, it’s happening, and I’m feeling it.

Happily, he’s having a great year. Happily, he’s finding colleges that feel like a fit and feel very doable, too, in terms of getting in. Happily, he’s (at least this week!) finding a balance between independence and, you know, actually hanging out with us and still talking.

But time does not feel like it’s slowing down.

Life has been change since the day he was born. Schools, friends, interests. Little changes, like letting a beard grow in, then deciding to change. BIG changes, like music. But this change. Oh, boy. It seems like every week, something new comes down the road. And if you lay all the new things in a line, like stepping stones, they lead straight to a decision, a choice, and a departure. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure he’ll visit, we’ll visit, our lives will continue to mix and merge, in all the ways we want them to. Hey, for all I know, some other change will come along, and he’ll land right back here for a chunk of time.

Still…

Autumn has never, ever played at 78 RPM before.

I have been so lucky to have this boy, this young man, in my life and home for the past 17 years. I am lucky, still. The other day I said to him, “Wow. Life sure is change.” And he said, in all that wisdom, “Thank goodness, right?

Still learning from him.

So, yeah, maybe this year, I need to not look at autumn as a slowing down. Maybe, just this once, I need to accept it as a leap forward.

Yesterday, we had to make The Decision about our cat, Lacey. It was one of those if-this-comes-back-again choices, and it did and very obviously. Which only makes The Decision the tiniest bit easier and doesn’t help the day at all.

I debated whether to blog about Lace or not. It always feels a little weird to put stuff like this out on social media. On the other hand, I know I don’t think it’s weird at all when other people do it. And then again, you know, for some of us, feelings take form in our minds as words, and then the words want to go somewhere. And then that helps. So…yeah. Blogging.

I’ve had a lot of cats. My parents were both veterinarians and had their own vet practice, and we pretty much always had three or four cats at any time, most of which had “found” us or been left at the clinic and brought home. When I met my husband, his cat adopted me, which was pretty awesome since Fred was known for his crankiness and not-high-love for most humans. Most, if not every single one, of the cats I’ve known have been pretty awesome in one way or another. And then came Lacey.

She discovered us by wandering into our yard one day when my son was about five. My husband told Ian that if he sat “really still,” the cat would probably come over to him. Which she did. And she never left. The vet thought she was about seven at the time. I never did figure out what her first years were like or where she might have come from, because she was clean, well-fed, and totally relaxed and friendly. This was not a cat who had been mistreated and run away and not a cat who someone had dumped, I was pretty sure. A wanderer, I thought. Except she never wandered again.  My son is now 17. Which, if the vet’s calculation was anywhere near correct, made Lacey about 19. It was no wonder things were shutting down.

Lacey was that magic combination of cat, both smart and sweet. If you know cats, you know that’s not all that common a mix. Sometimes the smart ones are cranky, and the sweet ones are, well…not the brightest bulbs on the tree. She had it all. She was a hunter, too–when she was younger she brought a cottontail bunny into the house (rescued by us, and a little helpful factoid for you: 409 does clean up rabbit pee!) and a baby bat (apparently they sometimes do their training flights during the day). She would meow in the middle of the night for my husband to come and play with the mouse she’d caught. I know, some people don’t like the hunting aspects of felines, and I’m not crazy about the corpses myself, but you have to admire that kind of talent and determination.

For the past few years, Lacey had definitely been a senior cat. She slept a lot, but was always there for TV time, waking up as we sat down and repositioning herself on a lap–she pretty much divided herself between my husband and son evenly. And this was the best thing about Lacey. There are dog people and there are cat people. I’m kind of a mix–I don’t want the care of a dog, but I will stop you on the street to have a little meet-and-greet with your dog, even if you’re in a hurry. And I don’t think I could live in a house that didn’t have a cat, because, hey–they really do add so much personality to the family mix. And, you know…fuzziness. But I know a complete cat person when I see them, and my husband and son fall solidly and heavily on that side of the line. My son doesn’t really remember Fred, who died when he was about three. But Lacey…I’m not sure Ian remembers not having Lacey. She has been the cat that either made him a cat person or, more likely, found the cat person already inside him and just merged with it. Just like I know that my son will always be reading and will always be building things and will always be playing music, I know that my son will always have a cat in his life. Sure, yes, there will be gaps–not sure most dorms allow felines, and life takes a bit of time to settle into and make the home that has the space for a pet, but he will find that place and he will find a feline to step into it. And take over. And while I think he would have gotten there on his own or with some other cat, I also know that Lacey has made this certain. She was a gift for Ian, for all of us, that–if I’d specifically gone out and looked for, I doubt I could have found. She came herself, and she changed our lives. I have always known that, yes, pets are part of a family, that they make a family, but–as many times as I’ve gone through this process before–that fact has never felt so true.

We will miss you, Lace. So very, very much.

If you follow me at Facebook, you probably know that, these days, my writing focus is on several picture books I’m revising. For someone who’s first book was middle-grade, who spent a couple of years working on a YA, and who has another middle-grade first draft waiting in the wings, this is a bit of a surprise. At least to me.

I’ve always loved picture books. Well, let’s say I’ve always loved a few, very-special-to-me picture books. Some came along from my childhood.

Others I collected in more recent years of being a mom and a writer.

But it was not a genre I ever expected to be writing in. When my son was little, yes, we loved picture books. We read STACKS of them. At the same time, though, I was–as a reader–eager to get to the books we could spend a little more time with. Jen Robinson recently posted about her daughter wanting Jen to read Little House in the Big Woods to her, and Jen asked about the first chapter books we shared with our children. Those were magic read-aloud years for me and, I think, for my son. From My Father’s Dragon to Lionboy the whole Harry Potter series, those were the years of long, pre-bedtime reading sessions, starting when my son was small enough to tuck himself up under my arm while I read to his being stretched out across most of the couch, leaving one cushion for me and the book. For Harry Potter, my husband took another chair in the room and listened, too.

And then…I wrote The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide. For each section, including the one on critiquing picture books, I wrote some made-up text, “sample” passages, to demonstrate what to look for in a critique and how to present feedback. While I was working on the picture book “sample,” I had an idea. I had an idea I liked. I decided I didn’t want to “give it away” to the critique book. And so I made myself a promise. I promised myself that, if I left the idea out of the critique book, I would take that idea and write it into a picture book. And I would take that picture book through all the drafts it took to be “ready,” ready at least to submit.

I kept that promise. I’ve had good feedback on the manuscript, enough to know that, yes, I can write in this genre. And another thing happened. I fell in love with this genre.

Why?

Well, in all honesty, a big piece of this is the length. I went back to work part-time a couple of years ago, and while you will never hear me say that writing a picture book is easier than another kind of book, because it isn’t!, it is easier to fit the work into my life these days. Yes, I can do a revision in a weekend. I’m not saying it’s the revision, and I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of weekend revisions for each book, but I just can’t do that with a novel. When you’re feeling a bit discouraged about your writing pace and how well you’re juggling the work hours and the writing hours, there is something encouraging about seeing actual, concrete progress.

But there are other reasons. I love the way a single sentence, a single word, can be both the problem and the solution. I love (and, yes, hate) the challenge of creating an active, problem-solving protagonist who, as a child, has such limited options for taking charge and having an impact. I love having to write words that will sound right, not just read right.

And possibly, most of all, I love the image of my audience that is in my head as I write. You’ve heard authors say that we all need to find “someone” to write for, someone who we visualize at the other end of our story? Well, my someone is, like my son was all those years ago, curled up on the couch, leaning against a warm, welcoming reader. My someone is completely captured by the words and illustrations in front of them. My someone’s eyes are sparkling as they listen to and, eventually, tell the story. My someone is searching out that book from the hiding place where a parent, perhaps just a bit tired of rereading it, has tucked it away, and my someone is saying, “Again!”

I think, with picture books, I have discovered why I lean toward writing the “younger” books. Yes, as an adult, even a not-so-young adult, I still feel all that magic in books. And, yes, I know plenty of teens who feel it. But, maybe, just maybe, the magic is at its strongest for younger children.

And maybe I can be part of creating it.

This morning, I had to to go the vet, and my son had to get to school to pick up his schedule.

WE WENT IN DIFFERENT CARS!!!!!!!!!1

Because, yesterday, the boy passed his driving test.

I know, I know. Everybody gets there. I know, I know, now the worrying starts. It still feels good. For all of us. We live in the mountains, and unless your kid wants to walk/ride a bike several miles uphill on a major highway, he’s pretty much car-bound, in terms of getting to school, friends’ houses, music practices, etc., etc., etc. We’ve made it work. We’ve been as polite and pleasant to each other about coordinating schedules as it is possible to be. My husband did do a lot of the driving, but as the one who wasn’t working outside the house for many years and the one who’s working part-time now, yes, I did more of it.  And my son is so ready. He didn’t rush things; he was pretty happy a year ago to hang out at home a lot, catch rides with us when necessary. But then, this year, he got a Life. It’s a good life, the right life for him, and one–I think–with a minimum of things to scare Mom and Dad. It’s a life he should be having, and one he should be able to get to. By himself.

 Yeah, I should probably be feeling a big Wow! I should be thinking, in amazement, how did he get this big? And I am. I really am.

But, you know, also this,