Reach for That Brass Ring aaaaand.....

I've decided not to feel bad about myself for not being Neil Gaiman. Neil's the Super Genius who wrote Coraline, the Sandman series of Graphic Novels and, one of my favorite books ever: Neverwhere. He's prolific and amazing. Me... less so. But I am plodding along, trying to get the hang of this writing thing.

At present I'm stalled out. I haven't written since Monday because I can't figure out What Happens Next. I am familiar with the overall arch of my story, but I am at a point where I need a bridge from Here to There, and I'm in a quandary. I'm going to need to take a few long, hot showers. Maybe then it will come to me.

Writing is hard. I admire the authors, like Neil Gaiman, for whom it seems to just spin forth... and I also admire those others for whom it is a more laborious process, or seems to be, but they just keep at it. Myself, I'll consider it a wild success if I can just manage to finish this one book... this one story I've been carrying in my head for years. If I can just get it on paper, I'll have won.

I am hoping to get back into it soon because I'm wildly bored otherwise. I have to admit that lately my job bores me beyond words. Oh, I love the museum: I love all the crazy specimens and the crazy curators and the exhibits and the visitors and the wonderful volunteers. But I'm heartily sick of writing the same press releases year in and year out, cranking out the same old tripe. Even the newsletter, which used to be a labor of love, has become a chore. The blog is more interesting, but you can't maintain a PR program on blog entries.

Part of my malaise is seasonal. This is a classically slow time of year. Programming trickles to a standstill by the first week of December. I won't have a new exhibition to write about until the spring, curatorial field work is at nil. Part of my problem is the routine. And part of it is this new fundraising function I've been handed.

I've been tasked with raising the next year's crop of corporate sponsors. Whoops. We're now calling them Corporate Partners. Essentially I need to go in and ask a bunch of businesses and corporations for money. Well... at first that was what I was doing. Now it's been revamped so that I'm essentially selling them advertising via the museum. So instead of asking for money, I'm a salesperson. Either way, I'm uniquely ill-suited for it.

I tried to approach this new role with enthusiasm. I tried to tell myself I just needed to hit that learning curve full force and go for it. But I'm petering out. I can pitch the museum all day to anyone who will listen... and plenty of people who won't. But I don't like asking them for money. This is, I think, the main problem with me and work now. This is the Big Thing I should be working on at this time of year, and I just haven't been able to work up any enthusiasm for it. Every day I futz with it a little bit, worry over it, move papers around. Make a couple of phone calls. But I'm not diving into like I know I should. And it's wearing on my conscience.

Today! I tell myself. Today I'll go after this project like Roxy with an unattended steak dinner. And so this morning once more I'm girding my loins, so to speak, to prepare for another day of figuring out which end of this thing to bite.

There. That was my do-gooder talk for the morning.

Yesterday at noon my student assistant and I went over to the OU Art school for the annual "Chili Bowl" fundraiser. For $15 you get to pick your own hand-turned clay bowl and fill it with all the homemade chili you can manage. There were probably 25 crockpots full of chili! Long tables filled the school's Lightwell gallery, and students, faculty, OU staff from every department, staff from the Norman CVB and the Arts Council, just about everyone in town was there, cheek-by-jowl, comparing their bowls and snarfing chili. It has to be a terrific fundraiser. Nearly zero costs: just for the sodas and supplies to make the bowls. The students do the turning and glazing. The staff and faculty come up with the chili. Genius. And fun, too, to see so many different folks piling in together for comfort food and an earthen dish. I sat between an art history faculty member and a first-year art student who was coming back to school to learn photography after spending several years in the oil business with his electrical engineering degree. Go figure.

Bob popped in only briefly, large social scenes being not his Bag, baby. I think it still sort of scandalizes my assistant that her first-year drawing teacher is dating her boss. His contribution to the chili cook-off is several cans of Hormel, dumped into my crock-pot. Its title is "More Fartsy, Less Artsy."

Not exactly GQ material...

Every so often I need a kid for a museum photo shoot, and naturally I press Grayson into service whenever I can. You'd think a kid as animated and dramatic as him would make a pretty good photo model.

It ain't necessarily so. Oh, he's adorable... if you're his mother. But he tends to get very silly when I point the camera at him.

Lately I needed some shots of kids with toys from the museum store, so I brought him in for an hour and turned him loose with various toys. Here are a few funny ones I got:

Grayson's not much at catch... and it shows in this frame.

It's called a Bilibo. Lots of kids wear them on their heads .

Silly face.

Another silly face.

I might look like that, too, if a miniature T. rex was attacking my face!

Cold weather finally has made an entrance here. We had intermittent rain storms, wind and cold all day yesterday. I was home babysitting the workers who were installing the new heating and AC unit in the house. It was a perfect day for sitting at home doing nothing. Cold and gray and rainy. I lay on the sofa under a blanket for most of the day, drinking coffee and reading, with the dogs all around me.

Sadly, the crew was not able to complete the installation of my heater, so this morning dawns clear skied, but COLD. And I've got a bit of a prickle in my throat that may not bode well.

But I'm content. The depression and grim self-loathing I experienced all last week seem to have lifted, and I'm grateful. What's a little cold if you've got your own (mental) sunshine? I feel like I'm on the final stage of recuperation from a long illness or injury.

I've used a little bit of my energy on writing. Still trying to stay in the NaNoWriMo game, though I fell behind this week, and I'm hovering around 15,000 words. The book is giving me some difficulty, sort of twisting under the pen, metaphorically, so I'm not sure exactly where to take up the work next. Things keep changing. I'll be in the shower when suddenly I'll have a realization: "OH! THAT'S what needs to happen next!" Well, but in that case, then I need to go back and add this, or change that, or tuck in another character or change where my characters are or..... I think my brain is always turning over the bits of the story, whatever else I'm doing. Some part of my brain is always working on the book.

It's a good feeling, when it's working. The writing itself is, as all the books say it will be... hard. I resist, I drag my feet. I count words over and over to see if I can be done yet for tonight. I put it off. Amazing that something I've wanted to do all my life can be such a chore. It hurts so good though... I've been going back over and over for more.

Grayson's with his dad this weekend and I'm relishing the quiet. G's not a noisy kid... but he always has to have some sort of background noise going on as accompaniment to whatever he's doing. He may be completely engrossed in making Pokemon creatures on the computer, but he will still have the TV on as well, with Sponge Bob or Zach and Cody or some other dreadful kids show on. I'm sure if I was any kind of mother at all I'd make him turn it off and go outside. But I don't. We all have our little things that help us feel at home. That's his.

His dad and I met with Grayson's teacher last week. I was frankly worried that it would not go well. As I've mentioned, I'm not all that supportive of her classroom discipline technique, and I was afraid that .... I don't know exactly. That I would be driven to tell her so in the meeting. But it went fine. We were all very pleasant and discussed G's shortcomings in a civilized manner. Turns out that she thinks he's a very smart and capable kid, but she's concerned about his level of self-responsibility. i.e: he's forgetful. Also, he rushes through his work so he can spend more time reading.

This last was a bombshell to us. Apparently G reads all day at school. Whenever he has free time to do flashcards or play games, he chooses to read. He does worksheets in under 3 minutes so he can get back to his book, and she says when he's reading he's completely deaf to the rest of the world, utterly absorbed in his book. This is a complete and utter surprise to us. I make G read every evening for half an hour and sometimes it's like pulling teeth. He gets distracted easily, is always wanting to talk about the story with me or read passages aloud. He will ask if it's time to go to bed yet, and suddenly become terribly tired and have to go to bed a few minutes early. This is the kid who can't put his book down at school? Gray and I were bumfoozled. Why is he so different at school? Why doesn't he read at home? It's not like he lives in a non-reader household, for crying out loud. I spend hours and hours every week reading. I'm completely mystified.

I've decided to up our evening reading time to 45 minutes, though. I know now it won't bother him a bit to do so, whatever he may say.