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l steinauer

l steinauer

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Reaching Through the Looking Glass

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

homelessness, parenting, writing, writing inspiration

Being a stay-at-home parent, I rarely experience moments with nothing to do. “Free time” usually involves running errands, cleaning, writing, and on the rare occasion, getting some exercise. But last week, for the first time in a long time, I found myself walking around downtown Berkeley with no kids and no obligations.

Ah, the sweet ambrosia of non-thought.

I walked toward the farmers’ market, my mind tuned to the voices around me, the smell of the concrete sidewalk, the peaceful solitude that is an unhurried afternoon alone. On the way, I passed by a girl- no, a young woman- putting on her white sneakers. She looked up at me, smiled, and said hello. That’s when I spotted the blankets behind her, the suitcase, the doorway that was her makeshift sidewalk home.

She was homeless.

How strange, I thought. She didn’t look homeless. Pretending not to feel the guilt I always feel when passing someone who lacks the basic comforts I usually take for granted, I kept walking. Just keep going and don’t think about it too much. There was still time to hit the farmers’ market before it closed. Maybe the season’s first strawberries had arrived.

As I circled street vendors selling kabobs, oranges and crepes, an imaginary voice entered my mind. It was the voice of a homeless girl. “You’re not really homeless unless you look homeless,” the voice said. “At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

Jeesh. Not this. Not a story about a homeless girl. This was my free time, my not-a-care-in-the world time. It wasn’t time to think about a homeless girl’s story. Too painful. Too hard.

Too late.

I passed right by the strawberries.

There is no such thing as downtime. Because it’s during downtime that your mind soaks everything in… and rearranges it. I don’t want to write about a girl on the street. I’d rather write about cats. Or about a boy who turns into a dragon whenever he eats broccoli. Or about pregnant fish, high school angst, fuzzy monsters, and uptight parents. Something simple. Something easy.

But you can’t always choose your stories. Stories sometimes choose you.

I turned around and began to retrace my steps, my feet leading me far far out of my comfort zone.

When I reached the doorway, the girl was no longer alone. Three homeless friends had joined her, so I turned back and returned to the farmers’ market to buy croissants- four of them.

I’m crazy. That’s what I am. Suburban housewife, mother of two, goes insane and hangs out with homeless people.

Standing over them, I mumbled some lame introduction and held out my bag of baked goods in offering. They thanked me, took the bag, and asked if I’d like a hit of weed- a return favor.

“No thanks,” I said. “But would you mind if I joined you for a bit… to talk?”

I spent my free afternoon in the shade of the doorway beside four young strangers who told me their stories. Well, only three of them did. The youngest, a fourteen-year old boy, silently smoked his joint until it disappeared, then immediately lit a hash pipe in attempt to burn away the pain of his past, and the uncertainty of his present. His future he blew into a smoky haze.

The rest of us talked about Lunchables pizza, the amazing mini pizza you can prepare without an oven, while people walked by us, averting their eyes, eeking out crooked, uncomfortable smiles. I saw myself in each of their middle-class faces, but this time I was on the other side of the glass.

No one asked me any questions. My secrets were mine to keep. But I told them a little, and when I mentioned that I was forty, they gasped. In their world, the world of the urban survivalist, I looked to be only around thirty, thirty-one max. I took the compliment.

The oldest of the group, Sam, was a friendly thirty-two year old man who looked older than me. He’d run away from home at fourteen, just like the boy sitting beside me. A father of three kids in three states, Sam told disjointed stories hinting of mental illness packed with kung fu fight scenes and gratuitous opinions about society’s ills. I found myself looking for opportunities to change topics and engage someone else.

It was really Marie, the 23 year-old girl wearing white sneakers, whose story I was most interested in. Maybe it was because she didn’t look homeless or sound mentally ill. Or maybe it was the way she first smiled at me and said hello, like she’d suddenly found herself on the wrong side of the glass. Clearly someone had made a mistake. She was a recent college graduate. She was sober. She was wearing nice glasses with a CS Lewis book tucked neatly between notebooks in her backpack. Her sneakers were clean.

Marie had been living on the streets for just a month. She told me her parents in Alabama forbade her from dating a Latino boy, so she moved to California with that boy, who then beat her. After two stints in ER, she escaped him and found herself suddenly homeless without a plan. I wondered how much of the story she told me was true. Maybe all of it. Maybe just parts of it.

I accompanied Marie to the Veteran’s building so we could keep talking. When the subject of her future came up, she shared her dilemma:

How do you grow in this environment without losing yourself?

I had no good answer.

She needed to get inside the building before the showers closed. Marie’s luxury was taking long hot showers. Once a week she’d go to Willet, the public pool- her spa, because she could take hour-long showers without anyone noticing.

Armed with a small white towel, Marie headed into the shower to continue her fight against looking homeless. I walked slowly back through the farmers’ market, giving a half-assed glance for strawberries. But I no longer wanted any.

I ordered a cappuccino in a nearby café and looked out the large glass window separating me from the outside. Inside, people wearing fancy sweaters ate arugula salad and talked about society’s ills. Outside, people wearing donation box clothes ate Lunchables pizza and talked about society’s ills.

I squeezed my key, the one that unlocks the door to my house, and took a deep breath. So much for relaxing free time. It felt like I had changed time zones and crossed international borders. Like I’d travelled into deep space and on my way back circled the moon. But I hadn’t really circled anything. I was just sitting in a Berkeley café three blocks from where I’d met Marie and her friends.

Three blocks, and one very thin piece of glass.

The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

aquarium, fish, parenting, querying, writing

While waiting to hear back from literary agents, here are two things you can do to keep your sanity from running off with your empty inbox:

1)   Write something else.

I made the mistake of devoting all of my free time (and I mean all of it) to writing and rewriting my manuscript. So when I started to query it with agents, I had nothing else to fall back on. Associating too much of myself with my manuscript made each rejection feel more painful than it should have. What I needed was another project to broaden my own identity as a writer. And it didn’t have to be big, like a novel. It could be a short story, or a picture book. With multiple projects, there’s always another angle to explore, another possibility…

2)   Get an aquarium.

Yes, I’m talking about living fish, those silvery zen creatures who swim in silent circles to the soft burbling sound of the tank’s filter. Feeling freaked out that you might not be the writer you once thought you were and every agent will reject your work?

Go look at the fish.

Feed them a few pellets and see how happy they are. At least they look happy, don’t they? For argument’s sake, let’s just pretend they’re happy.*

*Keep pretending they’re happy until one of them floats. Then you can call yourself a fish killer/bad parent/generally inept person. I mean c’mon, who can’t keep a lousy fish alive?

Apparently me.

But look at it this way, now you can have a deep conversation with your sobbing kids about the circle of life while driving to the aquarium store to have your fish water tested, resulting in:

1) A stern scolding from a fish-whispering misanthrope

2) A bigger tank

3) A new filter

4) An $85 bill

Then when you get home, you discover that your dearly departed fish, Taco, left  something else to remember him by:

Babies.

Lots of them.

Wait. How many?

Father of fourteen, Taco died with a smile on his face. And now your kids can watch the beauty of new life unfold in their aquarium…

Until the mommy fish start swallowing their babies.

Kids are crying again. Time for another, more confusing conversation about the circle of life. But we’ll leave that one for Dad.

So after all this grisly fish death and cannibalism, why would I recommend you get an aquarium?

Because you’ll totally forget about that empty inbox.

Blogging and Laundry

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

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Tags

blogging, querying, writing

Blogging is like hanging your laundry to dry over the plaza so the whole town can see your knickers along with the holes in your socks. It can make you feel exposed. Naked.

The first time I pressed “Publish” to publicly post my blog, I felt the same way I’d felt in eighth grade giving a speech in front of my school about why they should vote for me as their treasurer. Nerves struck and my mind blanked mid-speech. At that moment, I just wanted to run off the stage, cry, and chew my hair. Not that I was into hair chewing, but it seemed like a good time to start a bad habit.

And I’m left wondering, why do I blog when it’s such an uncomfortable process for me? I should leave it to the other folks who love doing this stuff. I think back to a house I once saw in Switzerland with a whole wall made of glass. It was a life-sized dollhouse and as I walked by, I could see the living room, kitchen and dining room. There was a real family in the glass house and they were eating dinner. I could see the food on their plates and that the kid wasn’t eating his broccoli. And I wondered who on earth would want to live in a glass house?

Now I know. Bloggers.

Today, I happened across a quote from Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. It’s a speech I’d already read, but this time, I applied it to a new area of my life: writing.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

“…Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. *

So maybe that’s why I keep blogging. Not because I want to live in a glass house, but because I need to overcome the fear of what other people might think of my words and my writing. Like querying a manuscript, blogging is another way to put your work out there in the world’s harsh lights. And Steve Jobs’ reminder that there’s nothing to loose, that fear of embarrassment and failure are unimportant, is timely. Because we are already naked. There is nothing left to lose.

*http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

How to keep yourself together while querying agents: duct tape

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by lsteinauer in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

literary agent, querying, synopsis, writers muse, writing

I first discovered my writer’s muse in the shower. Seeking a humid, sheltered environment, it had been nesting in the drain. When it saw me, the muse didn’t shy away. In fact, it was friendly. “Write a novel,” it said. “I’ll help you.” So I did what any aspiring writer would do- I threw on a pair of sweats, ran to Petsmart, and bought 50 jerky strips and a chew toy. I needed that little critter to stick around. And it did, twittering all sorts of ideas into my ear as I wrote and wrote. The novel writing thing lasted for three years (or was it four?) But everything came to a screeching halt once I decided to find an agent.

Ah, querying agents… Let me start by saying that nothing prepares a writer better for this process than watching American Idol. See that skinny guy with the prominent adam’s apple? The guy who sounds like he should be doing anything but sing? Now look at his face. He has no idea how bad he is. Meanwhile the judges are having small seizures in their seats, eyes rolling back into their heads, hoping the noise will stop. “Do you have any other skills?” one judge asks, regaining his composure. The other judge is more blunt. “You were bad, man. Really bad.”

This is what the querying and publishing processes involve. Risk. The new writer must make a choice: whether to open her work to public criticism and rejection, or not. The singer on American Idol may have been tone deaf, frighteningly so, but he had courage. And as I begin the querying process, I more fully understand just how much courage he needed to get on that stage.

Deep down, the writer may believe her novel is the greatest story ever told, and maybe it is. I mean, it has to be, right? Her mother loved it. Her writing group loved it. And the dog… well, he howls whenever she reads the ending aloud. Clearly, he finds her writing to be deeply moving. He also howls whenever a fire truck drives by, or when the seven year-old plays the recorder. But we won’t focus on such coincidences.

I attended my first SCBWI writers’ conference in Oakland last October. There, a published author critiqued the beginning of my manuscript, giving it an enthusiastic thumbs up. “You’re ready to query,” she said to my dismay. Then she gave me a reassuring hug, like she knew what I was in for.

The initial part of querying is not so bad. Yes, writing a query letter feels arduous. But it’s cake next to writing the synopsis. Distilling 87,000 words and multiple subplots into a mere five-paragraph synopsis is quite the task. Like plucking nose hairs, it hurts. And you may need to cry a few tears to get it done.

Sending out my first query letter left me feeling a little hopeful, a little frightened, and a lot like I was going to puke. I did everything I read I was supposed to do. I researched agents to find the right ones for my story, and started to follow some of them on Twitter. Now that’s a surreal experience in itself. Suddenly I’m reading a bunch of random facts about complete strangers I’ll likely never meet. One agent tweets regularly about her aardvark obsession, while three other people tweet about their favorite TV shows. But I have learned some important things from Twitter, like how many lattes a caffeine-addicted literary agent can consume in a day. (Four. After that, things get dicey.)

What do aardvarks and lattes have to do with writing and publishing? I have no idea.

It’s time to switch gears. I need to write something for my blog, but my mind is blank. Actually, it’s not completely blank. It’s filled with aardvarks drinking lattes. Then I remember my muse, my secret weapon. It’s never let me down before, and boy, do I need it now. So I start searching for it in all its old hiding places. But the dishwasher soap dispenser is empty. So is the Laundry hamper. Hmm… Something darts across the living room. It’s my muse. The phone rings, but I can’t answer. I’m busy hiding behind the couch holding a shoebox, waiting to catch the wily varmint.

My computer dings with the arrival of a new email so I put the box down and the muse runs to the other side of the room. I click open the email. It’s a rejection letter from Agent X, the aardvark lover. I sit down and stare at the screen. My muse tinkles on the rug and hides. Then with a boom something crashes beside me. It’s my ego, which has just fallen to pieces. Damn it. I go into the garage and grab a roll of duct tape.

They say you need to develop thick skin for this business. My skin is thin. That’s why I cry while watching dumb TV shows and why I had to hide in the bathroom late at night to finish reading THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE, so my sobs wouldn’t wake the whole house.

Instead I use duct tape. You can fix anything with duct tape, you know, even your ego. And ever since I mummified my ego, it’s been feeling pretty darn solid. Now for that next query letter…

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Recent Posts

  • From Across the Parking Lot
  • Sifting Through The Ashes of Berkeley Family Camp
  • Reaching Through the Looking Glass
  • The Birds, the Bees, and why I lied about Santa
  • The Zen of Querying with an Aquarium

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