Rules

I had an interesting student/teacher conference yesterday and spent most of last night agonizing over what to do about Laney's ongoing education. I won't go too much into it; suffice it to say that I'm on the horns or a rather luxurious dilemma. I got a smart kid who goes to a good public school that we didn't have to work too hard to get her into. But the question has come up if she should, perhaps, think of another school with programs designed for kids like her.

Laney, as the two or three of you reading this already know, was adopted. She sprang whole from the loins of another woman. As such, I often feel like she's a walking, talking, giggling, goofy four foot tall piece of anecdotal evidence supporting the primacy of nurture over nature. She is much like me: good and bad. For example, the kid hates to write. I don't mean the act of thinking stuff up - I mean the physical operation of writing. Me too. I hate to use a pen. I have terrible handwriting (as does Laney) and making things legible means sloooowwwwiiiinnnngggg it down so much. Laney's the same way and it drives both me and her teachers crazy to see her writing assignments with such meager detail and wanting depth. She's a good little critical thinker, and creative in her interpretation of text. I'm eager to get her onto a keyboard to see what happens when she's no longer responsible for making sure the person can make out the words she's trying to express.

Also, she's hard to get to focus. It took me a long time to finally come to grips with the fact that it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're not willing to do the work. I often talk to her about that famous Barack Obama story where his mother woke him up two hours before school to do extra work. He'd complain and she'd say "You think I'm having a barrel of laughs here, kid?" She's a fan of Barack Obama (don't know where she got that), and so I often pull that story out when I'm pushing her to sit down and do her homework.

But back to the point of this blog: when I was working on my book, I'd get distracted so often. I had to turn the wireless off my laptop, hide the remote, let the battery run down on my phone, keep the cork in the wine bottle. But I made it through. I did the work.

But now comes the even more boring part - googling for literary agents and publishers and taking strict notes about how, exactly, they expect to be queried. I can't photocopy 50 copies of the baseline query letter I wrote Tuesday, stick them in the mail and wait for fame and fortune to come following. Instead, I have to be painstaking and tedious, which are not things that come naturally to me. But I'll do the work.

I hope I can teach Laney the value of doing the work so that it doesn't take her into her 40's before she settles down and just fucking does it. It's difficult though, because there are Harry Potter novels to be read. And re-read.

Seriously - she's SO much like me! I've read them all at least four times each.