Not So Good Housekeeping

The kids are napping. I just made spaghetti sauce for dinner, cleaned the kitchen (halfheartedly), and folded laundry. (I'll be honest: my mom was over this morning and she folded about three quarters of the laundry, which I had artfully scattered around the living room in a pitiful attempt to get her to feel sorry for me and do it. It worked.)

I don't mind cooking, but I'm not great with housework.

I have an excuse, though! I'm a writer, and a freelance one at that. In the time it takes me to clean the house, I always tell my husband, I could write an entire article. It just doesn't make sense for me to clean for hours when we can hire someone to do the entire house for a fraction of what I charge for an article. (Sadly, that theory didn't really wash when I was writing the novel and we were paying someone to clean the house and take care of the kids a few mornings a week while I sat and wrote something I wasn't getting paid for. I unsucessfully tried to sell it as one of those Mastercard commercial vignette's:
A clean house: $60 plus tip
Occupied children: $13 per hour
A happy writer working on her first novel, unshowered and still in her pajamas .... priceless.)

I do wish I had a clean house, even if, as L.M. Montgomery might have written, clean houses provide less scope for the imagination. I also wish I were a perfect housekeeper, mother, and wife. I wish I could be the kind of mom who is more than happy, when her little darlings go off to dreamland, to scour the floor of harmful bacteria they might pick up as they crawl, bake them organic, whole grain, carob chip goodies, and plan a craft for when they wake up that's more inventive than slopping glue on a piece of paper and dumping dried chickpeas on top of the glue. (It's bean art! Lovely!)

Instead, the second the kids go to sleep, I throw the lunch dishes in the dishwasher, turn on CBC Radio 2, power up my laptop, and start to write.

Sometimes, I write emails. Sometimes, like today, I write blog posts. Sometimes, I write fiction. And sometimes, I actually write those paid articles I use as the excuse for being such a slattern.

I wondered if there were other writers out there like me, so I typed "writers don't clean the house" into Google.

On the first hit, a writer's blog, the writer was talking about how fabulously clean her house is when she has writer's block. "I know I'm not the only writer," writes Merrilee Faber, "who rushes to do the dishes and mop the floor when their subconscious is conspiring against them."

Um, uh oh.

Am I the only writer who, when I have writer's block, makes a cup of tea and reads a really good book? Or emails a friend a longwinded missive she doesn't bother to spell check? Merrilee was making me feel bad, until I continued reading her post: "Today my house is a vile pit of filth and disease, suitable only as a rancor den (but without the tastefully scattered bones)."

Ah, that's better. Mine, too.

xo Marissa

The Waiting

I wrote a book.

It's called Saving the World (In Sensible Shoes) and it's currently being shopped to publishers by my fantastic agent.

Which means, I'm going crazy.

Tom Petty said it best: "The waiting is the hardest part." It really, really is. Every morning, I tell myself, this might be the day a publisher calls my agent and says, "I must have this book, immediately, if not sooner! Get Marissa Staple-Poni-whatever-her-last-name-is on the phone now. We need to lock this deal down." (I have no idea if that's actually the way publishers talk. Somehow, I doubt it. But at the moment, I have no frame of reference, so the publishers in my head all talk like Texan businessmen.)

Every time the phone rings, my heart races, because I think it might be said agent calling to tell me of the aforementioned enthusiastic phone call from The Best Publishing House in the World. (That's what I'll call them, after they call.)

I check my email (constantly), and yet the dread of receiving a rejection is almost too much for me. The seconds that elapse between hitting send/receive and loading my messages seem like an eternity fraught with anxiety. I check voicemail endlessly, too. It's like waiting for the boy I like to call. Except that he hasn't called yet. Sigh.

(I'm not actually waiting for a boy to call. I'm happily married to a man who always calls when he's supposed to and says he doesn't mind playing second fiddle to my publishing dreams, or my talking constantly about my future book deal, or having to read endless drafts of my novel when he'd rather be watching Sports Line.)

I'm obsessing. An easy thing to do, I suppose, when the project I've worked on for almost two years and revised no fewer than eight times has finally been sent out into the world, all alone, without her mummy. I need distraction. Possibly, I need professional help. "What you need," said a friend, who is also a writer (but a published one -- she wrote this, and has another equally exceptional work coming out in the spring.)"is to start your blog, novel sold, or not sold. Who cares? Go for it!" (Or something to that effect. She probably didn't say "go for it". She probably said something much cuter.)

So I'm taking her advice. I'm going to use this space to chronicle my novel's journey from pre-published, to post-published, and beyond -- because frankly, this is the exciting part, even if I'm functioning these days on far too few nerves and far too much adrenaline. Maybe Tom Petty's wrong. Maybe the waiting is actually the exciting part. Maybe I should be embracing the heart palpitations and enjoying the dreaming and creative visualizations another novelist-to-be pal has encouraged me to practice. As in, I lie in bed at night and picture myself a renowned, accomplished author, and then one day -- poof! -- I am one. Right, so it probably doesn't work that way, but it's still fun. I bet David Suzuki always hoped to one day pose practically nude for the CBC. And then, one day -- poof! -- he was standing there with a maple leaf over his unmentionables.

(The protagonist of my novel has a small crush on David Suzuki. More of an intellectual one, really, but this photo definitely fans the flames. I, of course, do not. The only unrequited crush I have is on the publisher from whom I am desperately awaiting a call. Sigh.)

So that's me. A finished work of comedic women's fiction with an eco-twist waiting to be sold, and some extra time on my hands.

I'll keep you posted!

xo Marissa

Contact Marissa

E-mail: marissa@marincommunications.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/marissastapley