It’s been too long since a reading update! As always, I’d love to know what you’re all reading as well.

What I’m reading: Lately, I’ve had a terrible habit of starting new books before finishing the last, so I read the following simultaneously:

Heads in Beds is written by a long-time employee in the hotel and tourism service industry, and is funny, entertaining, and educational. Give it a read if you’re in the travel business, but also if you just stay in a lot of hotels, or just want to learn how to eat everything in the minibar and not pay for a thing (yes, really).

One Tough Mother is the memoir of Gert Boyle, long-time president and now chairman of Columbia Sportswear. Her story, which starts with fleeing Germany in the 1930s, is fascinating and inspiring, plus she’s just damn funny. It’s a great read from a business point-of-view, but just as valuable if you want a few tips on how to achieve a well-lived life.

What the kids are reading:

Nate (13) is reading Ann Brashares’s My Name is Memory. She’s best-known for her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, but this is one of her grown-up offerings, and I loved it so much I pushed it on Nate. Thankfully, he’s liking it, too. It’s a poignant story of what the world would look like to someone who lives multiple lives over centuries of world history. It offers a unique world perspective, and is by turns remarkable, sad, desperate, and beautiful. The ending is, in my opinion, odd, so if anyone else has read, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Calvin (age 11) is reading The Maze Runner, which is a recommendation we’ve offered before, when Nate read it in middle school. Is Calvin, in 6th grade, ready for this book? It’s debatable, but he’s burned through all of the 6th grade recommended offerings, leaving him nowhere to go but up (and to more mature topics).

After watching Titanic for Retro Family Movie Night, Toby’s been obsessed with the event. (Not sure this is healthy, but what can you do?) He’s reading through Gordon Korman’s Titanic series for kids, and peppering us with Titanic facts as he goes.

to the mother of my mother. Without you (and the father of my mother, too), I wouldn’t be the lucky daughter I am, nor the fun, smart, loving, and wise parent I strive to be.

We miss you this Mother’s Day and every day.

For those of you who follow the novel querying process, either because you’re in the midst of it yourself or just want to know how things are going because you’re nice like that, I still have one ‘full’ out for the Novel that Won’t Die. I used to have two. The second one was rejected last week in a particularly painful near miss. Actually, all the near misses are painful, but this one was so close to a yes, I could feel the rush of wind as the opportunity passed me by. Those are the worst.

Sometimes I truly think I’d rather hear that I have no talent at all and no chance at a book deal so I can lay all this down and walk away rather than hear that X, Y, and Z are all great, but the stars are just not aligning right now. For whatever reason. Instead, I’m told three positives to every negative, and unilaterally: keep working. Revise. Restructure. Again.

This last agent had my full manuscript for a number of months, and gave me quite detailed feedback…of the good variety. Her reason for passing was entirely structural, suggesting changes to the progression of characterization I had just flipped in the final days of the final draft. Hello, irony. Never good to see you. Reading her notes felt like correcting my own multiple choice test to learn that bubble A, which I had originally picked then scrubbed out with my eraser at the last second, was in fact the right answer.

Of course, this is only one agent’s opinion, and so I carry on. If you’re a novel writer, you know how much each and every draft draws out of me, how little I have left at the end of the day for my family, my friends, my own emotional headspace. You know how much effort it is, brick by brick, each one with the ability to sink you. In the meantime, I keep threading water. If you’re here too, give me a wave.

Sitting on the bottom shelf of the dining room bookcase are a row of fat, canvas-covered photo albums. They start at Nate’s birth, and dutifully carry on year after year, a line of brightly colored soldiers of family history. Some years, they’re scrapbooked meticulously. Others, they’re generated digitally from Kodak or Shutterfly. The most recent 18 months or so are still sitting on my hard drive, not yet enjoying the light of day.

In my bedroom is a chest filled with journals. I started keeping them at age 8, and they continue until about age 25, when I started purging my thoughts and emotions in online journals instead: first message boards (remember the Yahoo ones?), then Livejournal, then WordPress. The last year or so, the words have been fewer and farther between.

The photos I take now center on travel, the words I write on travel experiences. They still tell the story of our family, but the ones that see publication are for work: the awesome shot of Calvin against a background of white makes it into the article on the ins and outs of planning a ski vacation, the portrait of Toby in a kayak is for the cover of an outdoor magazine on Canadian travel. What’s missing: the goofy photos of everyone settled on the couch for movie night, the blur of uniforms on evening soccer games, the obligatory eating shots during celebratory meals at Easter or a Memorial Day picnic.

It’s not that I’m not taking these photos or penning words about them. It’s just that I’m triaging them, filing them under ‘get to later’ in favor of the photos with deadlines, the videos with publication dates attached. I suppose I still record our family’s history more than most parents, simply because I have to, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like something’s omitted, a page torn, a line redacted. What’s missing is the subtext…the lesser moments when I don’t bother with the camera ‘because I’m behind as it is’.

I’m moving these moments up in priority. Next month, I’m scheduling two work days and reserving them for personal photo album and journal catch up. Maybe the only people who will ever view them is my family, but that’s the point, isn’t it?

It’s kind of the point to all of this.

We’ve driving home from middle school; I’ve got a full car load of 8th grade boys. Their backpacks take up all the empty space at their feet, and they all smell slightly of sweat. I crack the windows because it’s April and the breeze is almost warm. Someone has a Z-bar and they all want some.

“It wasn’t a gun,” one of them says to the others. I just listen, from the driver’s seat. “It was a bunch of bombs, and they exploded everywhere.”

“Nu-uh, dude,” another says. “It was a terrorist attack and it was lots of guys with grenades.”

“Grenades? Grenades don’t do that, bomb like that. You don’t even know what grenades do,” someone counters. I don’t bother to look back to see who. It could be any one of them; they all converse in circles.

“I heard they arrested a guy.” That’s from the back row.

“Yeah, they got him. Dude shot at the police, but they still got him.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t shoot at him back. I would have shot him back, you know?”

There’s unanimous agreement. “Yeah, he killed people. People who were just standing there.”

They talk about guns. How many they will have when they’re grown up. How many their dads have. There’s one dissenting voice; that we don’t need any. No one needs any. “You’re crazy,” someone argues. “We all need lots.”

We pass a bank on the right. The flag out front is flying half-mast. My front-seat passenger points. “See, that’s for the people who died.”

From the middle seat: “I thought it was for Newtown. Those kids.” I glance sidelong at him as I check for traffic. His mouth is pinched tight.

There’s a pause, a heavy bit of silence as we cross the intersection. Then: “No, that was the old thing. This is the new thing. The flag always flies for the new thing.”

I love that I now write for a living. Full time. Full stop. Even just saying it makes me happy.  If you missed this bit of news, last month I took the plunge and quit my day job. I am now home from 8 am to 2 pm with only my screen (and my dogs) in front of me, and yes, I make a living from it.

But.

The living I make is in travel writing. I added to my freelance load and signed a new contract with family mega-site Trekaroo. I’m now the Editorial and Sponsorship Manager, in addition to being the outdoor family travel columnist at OutdoorsNW and staff writer at Go Green Travel Green and Practical Travel Gear. And yes, I am still founding editor of Pit Stops for Kids. None of this is not a negative in and of itself, because I love travel writing. I’m blissfully happy writing about travel for seven hours a day, every day. But.

But.

It doesn’t leave much time for creative writing. In fact, I haven’t written one word on my current novel-in-draft in four weeks. Between actually traveling and writing about travel, managing editorial and meetings with travel brands and PR companies, I simply have nothing left. I don’t know whether this is a bad thing or an ok thing.

I still have two fulls out for The Novel that Won’t Die. They’ve been out for a long time, and I don’t feel good about it. It feels too long. And that novel is so polished, so ready, that I don’t know where to go from here. Other than to start over with the next. Which is stuck at the 10,000 word mark, treading water, while I write about everything else under the sun.

I don’t know what is to be done. I suppose it is what it is. Honestly, novel writing feels like a mountain that can’t be moved right now. And just so recently, I felt I had such momentum. That’s what happens in this world of creative fiction that’s so often self-driven: you’re in solitary. There is so little outside stimulation. No paycheck awaits. No editor has given you a deadline. If it weren’t for writing group, you’d be in complete isolation. All motivation must come from within. And you can only be pushing to that finish line for so long. You can’t keep it up indefinitely. So I suppose I’m on the sideline for a while, taking a breather. I am doing what I’m doing, the novels are doing what they’re doing, and what can I do about it?

Other creative writers, want to chime in? How do you stay motivated? How do you know when to stop beating a dead horse and saddle up the next?

Yes, Retro Family Movie Night is back! We had a busy period where we simply didn’t have many Friday nights available, but that’s no way to live, so we’ve rectified it!

Title: Titanic

Debut: 1997

Rating: PG-13

Starring: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio,

Directed by: James Cameron

Summary: (From IMDB): A seventeen-year-old aristocrat, expecting to be married to a rich claimant by her mother, falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

What we fondly remember: Um, I think I watched this movie three times in the theater alone. I know there are haters out there, but I don’t care. I’ve always been a sucker for it.

What was refreshing: Watching a drama for a change. If my kids had their way, it would be all comedies, all the time. Getting a little period drama in the mix was welcome to me.

Red flags: It’s intense, of course. We set out to watch only the first half of this looong movie, thinking the actual sinking would be too much for Toby (age 8). As it turned out, the boys were all so invested by that point that we watched the whole thing. There’s some language in the scenes with the recovery crew at the beginning, and of course there’s also the nude drawing scene and the stolen moment (sex) in the back of the car parked in the cargo bay, but it’s nothing explicit. I was much more concerned about the human suffering depicted in the final 45 minutes.

Kids’ Review: The boys really liked it, as I knew they would once they’d given it a chance. In fact, watching Titanic sparked a lot of interest in the actual tragedy, and Nate is now reading the short A Night to Remember by Sir Walter Lord, and Toby is reading a kids’ historical series on the Titanic by Gordon Korman. Was the sinking too intense? Probably. It definitely left an impression on the kids. But I think the critical thinking and discussion it prompted outweighed any negative impact of its tragic scenes. If you have very sensitive kids, it might not be for them, but if you think they can handle it, give it a try!

Want more after the credits roll? Catch up on past reviews here!

As a child of educators and after working in education myself, I believe in the message of the following guest post.

School lessons are clearly at the core of a child’s education, but homework is an essential feature of schooling and parents have a major role to play. Every teacher knows only too well that kids do better in school when parents support their education and take an interest in their homework. This reinforces the importance of what the children or teens are achieving. Here are just a few tips for organizing homework sessions with the kids.

Make a plan

Study and organization skills do not come easily to everyone and there is no doubt that making a plan is the first step to achieving homework success. This is best done with the kids, rather than for them. Parents who get to know the teachers are in a good position to ask them about school homework policies and how they like parents to be involved. A good plan will take account of your child’s preferred learning style, when they study best and what specific challenges they have encountered in past homework.

A suitable place to work

To minimize distraction, it is important to identify a space where concentration is easy. This means no loud TV, noisy siblings or music in the background. Choose a well-lit place to complete homework and make sure there are adequate supplies of paper, pens and pencils, glue or scissors. If part of the homework is onscreen a little discreet monitoring may be a good idea to avoid the possibility of your child straying into online games sessions or social media sites.

Some children work best at a desk in their bedroom or in a den, where they can work independently; others want to be settled at the kitchen table. Letting them pick the spot is fine if it improves their focus, as long as they are not too far removed from tactful supervision. Scheduling a quiet family work period where everyone is involved in quiet activities, such as reading, coloring or doing homework can be a really effective aid to concentration.

Children should do their own homework, not have it done for them. A parent’s role is to encourage and motivate, answer questions that will help kids arrive at correct solutions and check that homework has been completed to the required standard.

Getting extra help

Sometimes, children find they have a problem and need extra help. It may be that their academic skills are not honed quite enough and they are struggling to complete assignments or understand demanding subjects. Often, parents decide that a little extra tutoring in a specific subject will supplement school lessons and parental assistance. This is particularly true of core subjects, such as English, math and science; sometimes a personal tutor or online tutoring can really help. Try to identify if there is a specific strand that is causing a problem. For example, if your child needs help with algebra, speak to specialist educators about how best to access algebra help. 

Always seek to identify your child’s successes in schoolwork and praise them for their achievements. This will encourage them to continue to work hard and apply themselves.

I pretty much just Powered Down for 11 straight days, people. And it felt great, though I felt like I was gone from this space for so long. While we were in Tahoe, I could only do the bare necessities work-wise, triaging emails and maintaining social media on the go. I wrote one article at the crack of dawn before it was due, took one afternoon off the slopes to write another (also due that day), and spent the car ride home creating video, but other than that, the laptop was closed.

Here’s one of my favorite photos of the trip:

I am well aware that for me, a big part of the appeal of travel is the opportunity it affords me to step out of my regular life and live more fully in the moment with my family or in my surroundings. Or both. Usually both. And it’s not just me: everyone’s busy schedules are suspended, and our days are spent in shared experience. Our evenings are open to play board games, watch TV together, or simply crash at 8 pm. (Skiing is draining!) I love that cocoon of family I can create best when I drag them all away from home.

If you’re wondering about Power Down, I’m still going off-line two hours each work day, or alternatively, shutting down operations entirely all Wednesday. Depending on the week, I’m doing what works for me.  You may have noticed the podcasts suspended for the time being. Why? Heather King and I, along with our collaborators at SITS, feel very strongly about doing things right, the best they can be done, and frankly, podcasting just wasn’t what any of us know how to do best. It’s as simple as that. We wanted to give it a run, but none of us were comfortable with the result. Our guests were fantastic, but our tech stills were lacking. We still believe in the message of Power Down as much as ever, but are looking into new mediums to get the idea out there. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, anyone else out there Powering Down regularly? How’s it going? Does it make a difference?

And I’ll never get tired of saying that.

Have a great spring break, everyone!