Here comes the...

Well!

Nearly 10 years from the time that Breakup Babe was born on a sad, sweaty summer day, she (I) got engaged.

Yes, moi. Engaged to be married!

I am finally wearing that diamond ring that Breakup Babe so longed for in her sexy little struggle, or at least claimed she did. Personally I think she really enjoyed her sl*tty phase, knowing (if not truly believing) that she might one day settle down.

I'm a little terrified, to tell you the truth. I know it won't be that different from the Domestic Bliss (TM) that Dave and I live in currently with Snuffy the spirited senior pug in our 650-square foot condo with only one bathroom. The Domestic Bliss (TM) that we have been enjoying for oh, almost four years now.

We pretty much are married except that I don't yet enjoy the benefits of Dave's killer health insurance and haven't yet received loads of fancy cookware or gone out on the town wearing a veil and waving a dildo. (Wait, is that what people do at bachelorette parties? I've never actually been to one.)

Still I'm too terrified to talk about actual marriage. So let's talk about WEDDINGS! Now that's a subject I can get behind!

Wedding Fever!
Our purported plan is to get married while the weather is still nice enough to tie the knot OUTDOORS and while mom is still healthy enough to enjoy it.

And an outdoor wedding in this part of the world limits you to the second half of July, August, and September.

WHICH IS NOT VERY FAR AWAY!

So far, here's what I've done in preparation:

• Read the terrifying and hilarious book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding
• Look at four locations:
• Cama Beach State Park/Camano Island State Park
• Camano Island Inn
• Golden Gardens Bathouse
• Skansonia Ferry 
• Made a plan to go see these places:
• Jenne Farm, Whidbey Island
• Admiralty Head Lighthouse, Whidbey Island
• Set up a cake tasting here:
• New Renaissance Cakes

I loved Cama Beach and Camano Island State Parks (both on Camano Island). Cama Beach has quaint, historic waterfront cabins on the beach and a gorgeous new hall with fantastic views that's perfect for a reception. And adjacent Camano Island State Park has some idyllic spots overlooking the water for a ceremony.

However I'm not sure Camano Island is gonna work out for boring reasons mainly having to do with stuff already being booked except for Sunday nights and how I don't want to have a wedding on Sunday, blah blah.

All right I'm talked out. I'm sure you'll hear more about this in the days to come.

You might also witness some brainstorming about how I can write a sequel to BreakupBabe that features her older, wiser, engaged self yet where she is still neurotic and impulsive enough to create *conflict* and *crazy adventures*!

Greetings, Earthlings.

Me and mom in the old days

This has been a wacky fall and winter. I've been a bit under the weather and keeping a lower profile than usual. My mom was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer a year ago and it seemed to hit me all at once this past October.

First with a cold that never went away. Then the tension headaches that ate Manhattan.  Oh and let's not forget the back injury I got working on my laptop IN BED (the most unglamorous injury ever) and also the knee injury earned backcountry skiing last April (a tad more respectable) that have kept me from hitting the snowy slopes and neon lights with as much fervor as I usually do.

Oh, poor me, right? Meanwhile my mom is going through chemo and losing her hair and having many awful symptoms, on top of worrying when this stupid cancer is going to kill her. She has always been so robust and active (like me) and now this monster has laid her low.

But not TOO low. Because since her diagnosis she quit her job, traveled to the Galapagos with my sister, and to Alaska with me (on the worst-weather-ever-but-at-least-the-boat-didn't-sink-cruise.) Soon she's headed to Hawaii and Russia.

Best news yet, her doctor told her this week she was in remission. Yes, remission! That was a word none of us expected to hear ever. Not that she's cured, her doctor sternly told her. This thing could rear its ugly head in another three months or another year. It will rear its ugly head again, says Dr. Oncologist.

But while the monster is in hibernation, she can take a break from chemo. Yay! She can get back the two weeks out of every month that she loses from being poisoned. Yay! Her eyelashes can grow back and food might taste normal again and she'll regain some of that vibrant energy that has made her such an unstoppable force for creativity and social justice and adventure all her life.

So that's what I've got for you.

Plus:

• I'm speaking at the AWP conference in February (along with some staggeringly famous authors). Who-hoo, freezing Chicago, here I come!
• I'm teaching an online blogging class for the Editorial Freelancer's Association starting Feb 15.
• I just finished my first screenplay, called "Planet of the Ex-Boyfriends."

Ok, maybe "screenplay" is a stretch. It's a  five-minute script. For my class at Experimental College called "Let's Make a Movie!"

Tonight we'll be voting on a script to make movie out of (anyone in the class can submit one) and I want mine to win! If it doesn't, it was hell of fun to write, which is more than I can say about a lot of things I've written recently.

Alaska, Eugene, and Other Fall Adventures

 Dave and Snuffy

Hello everyone and happy fall! This is my favorite season. There have been many beautiful autumn days here in October and November and while I haven't gotten up into the mountains to see the larch trees (grr) I have taken many nice bike rides.

Mom in Juneau, Alaska

One of those great bike rides was in Eugene, Oregon, where I was on assignment for a story about Oregon's designated scenic bikeways. Dave and I lived it up in the lap of luxury at the Campbell House Bed and Breakfast, then thoroughly enjoyed ourselves amidst fall splendor on a bike trail variously referred to as the Lake Dorena trail, the Covered Bridges trail, and the Row River Trail.

 It's the newest of Oregon's designated scenic bikeways - so new that it's not even on the website yet but it will be soon. And it's well worth riding!

You'll get to read all about it when I write the article for OutdoorNW's special cycling edition in the spring. Speaking of OutdoorsNW, I recently took a part-time job there as an assistant editor, and it's an absolute blast. Check out the blog post I wrote for them about my August backpacking trip to the Cascades.

As for other fall adventures, there was the  ill-fated Alaska cruise that I went on with my mom in September. The cruise (which started in Anchorage and went to Vancouver) got delayed for two days because of the weather, and the seas were so rough that we had to skip most of our ports of call. However, on the positive side we got to see some great fall colors there too when we weren't being tossed around on stormy seas and getting seasick. Above is a photo of my mom taking in the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, the one port that we did get to vist.

Late Summer Report

Hello all,

Snuffy prepares for a day at the office

It's finally summer here in Seattle and about time - it's late August! Even though the sun has been reluctant to shine, I've still been quite restless, running around hither thither, and dipping my toe into all sorts of things.

Besides working hard at a new part-time editing job Geeksoft (I KNOW! I CAN'T ESCAPE THEM!) I've been leading trips for the Seattle Mountaineers, taking part in a new writing group, taking classes at Richard Hugo House, kayaking on various northwest bodies of water such as the Duwamish River and Deception Pass, attending writing workshops at Field's End, getting all sorts of writing, speaking, and teaching events lined up for the next few months, and working on a novel for kids 8-12

I'll be teaching my popular "Roughing It" class in the fall and this time I plan to write a rough draft in six weeks right along with my students.

And this weekend I'll be cleaning up horse poop as a volunteer for Hope for Horses! If you happened to catch my reading at Salon of Shame in 2006 or Cheap Wine and Poetry in 2009 you heard an excerpt from a novel I wrote in sixth grade about "the love between a girl and a horse" during which many melodramatic things happen including my protagonist falling off her beloved horse into a pit of rattlesnakes.
I was in love with horses when I was a girl and I still am. Alas, I just haven't had the funds to buy or ride one, much less board one somewhere (although Dave suggested we might have room in our 10' by to 10' storage locker). So I'm looking forward to some horse time this weekend.

That's all the news that's fit to print for now. Aurevoir and see you in the fall.

Hello Darlings,
It's been a fab spring for publishing!

Besides getting published in Harbors Magazine and Modern Love Rejects (*with an essay that is about to be reprinted any second on the fabulous site Dating Diva Daily*) I've now published a story very dear to my heart on Literary Mama for their Father's Day edition.

This essay looks back at the formative years I spent backpacking with my family in the high Sierras. In particular it celebrates the way my dad threw himself into backpacking - dragging us along with him - after a major heart attack nearly killed him at 33.

I first wrote a version of this essay when I was about 11 years old. My parents - convinced I was a literary genius - sent it off to Backpacker Magazine, which promptly rejected it.

Then I took another stab at it in a college creative writing class with the the late great Leonard Michaels. That version had some damn good description in it if I do say so myself (Lenny's faint praise be damned):

"The most exciting part of the trip was glimpsing Wire Lake for the first time. It would appear in a sudden flash of silver through the trees. My dad usually offered a nickel to the first kid who saw it. Fifteen minutes later, we would come upon the lake in its entirety, sparkling blue and immense. Time would reduce its size and brilliance in my imagination, so that its beauty was always shocking."

Still, it was another 10 years before I dusted the thing off to try again: this time as an attempt to get published in a Seal Press anthology about father-daughter travel adventures. I never finished that version though I did come up with a good opening for it.

And finally, three more years after that, I dug it up, thought "that's a good opening!"  and then polished it the rest of it to a fine sheen for a travel writing contest at Wanderlust and Lipstick.

Which I did not win! I did not even get an honorable mention! Hmmph. But in the end, that is not the important thing. The important thing is I finally (finally!) wrote the essay to my satisfaction, and now it has been published. Just in time for Father's Day.

Here's to you Dad - who taught me to love and feel comfortable in the mountains, so that they are now like a second home to me. I miss you very much but you are always there with me on the trail, in the meadows, on the peaks, and - most of all - on the peaceful alpine lakeshores as the sun goes down.

Happy Birthday to Me

Greetings all. Late spring has finally arrived here in Seattle, meaning it's sunny (sort of), warm (sort of), and yet another birthday is about to roll around. (Yay! Cheering despite fears of creeping decrepitude!)

Besides the many lavish gifts I'm sure I'll receive from friends and family, one of the best is coming in the form of publication. Though I've published quite a few things over the years, never has something gotten published on my actual birthday.

The backstory: Five years ago, on the eve of the publication of BreakupBabe: A Novel, I attempted to get over my postpartum novel-writing depression by pouring my energies into an oh-so-witty and incisive essay about blogging and how it had blessed my writing life and cursed my love life. This was not just any essay, though. This essay would be published in "Modern Love" in the New York Times!

I slaved over this essay with Modern Love in my sights. I don't know why I wanted to be published in Modern Love so bad. I wasn't looking for an agent or a book deal - I already had one of those. I just wanted to. Since I was now a bonafide expert on writing about love, lust, and relationships, my writing (so I believed)  was a natural fit for this most coveted of columns.

You know where this is going, right? My story got rejected. Oh, the hubris! I even turned down the chance to contribute an essay to Single State of the Union because I was working on this stupid, soon-to-be-rejected essay.

After picking up the pieces of my broken heart, I submitted the essay a few more places. Then I gave up. Because after all, this piece was written expressly for Modern Love. It didn't belong anywhere else, damn it!

So imagine my delight when a writer friend told me recently about a new website called "Modern Love Rejects," a site that publishes - well, just what it sounds like.  I checked out the site and found out that I was in very good company indeed. Lots of good writers get rejected from Modern Love. Multiple times! Including the founders of the website, who are widely published journalists and authors both.

I also found out that the site doesn't publish just any reject essay: the editors have to like it and think it fits the "Modern Love" format. You also have to forward your rejection from the Modern Love editor to prove your claim that you actually submitted there.

Here's mine: "Dear Rebecca, I read your piece with interest, and it's nicely handled, but I'm afraid we've done a few 'blog' pieces, including one early on that had the writer starting the blog as a means to vent after a break up. Even though that was a while ago and yours heads in a different direction, it still feels a bit too close and familiar. But thanks for trying me."

I was therefore tickled pink when Modern Love Rejects not only accepted my essay but told me it was one of the nicest rejections they had ever seen from the Modern Love editor without it actually being an acceptance. Whoohoo!

So there you go. My favorite birthday present of the year (though more lavish gifts could roll in at any minute). Look for it on Monday, May 23rd!

Meanwhile, while I'm bragging about my own accomplishment, I do want to give a shout-out to two of my Seattle writer friends who actually did get published in Modern Love recently: Kathy Harding, who writes about finding love and getting pregnant when she least expected it, and Nicole Hardy, whose essay is called "Single, Female, Mormon, Alone."

Spring arrives with a crash

Pre-collision skiing at Scottish Lakes

Happy spring!

A lot has happened since my last post, including smashing into a tree while skiing at one of my favorite places, Scottish Lakes High Camp. Luckily I walked away with only a minor knee sprain. It hurt like h*ll when it happened but it could have been a whole lot worse. So while I feel dumb (Hello! why did I not steer away from that stupid tree?) I also feel lucky.

Meanwhile, things have been going a little more smoothly in the writing world. Here's the latest:

*Two articles that I wrote came out in the spring issue of Harbors Magazine. Check out my Portfolio page to see them, or better yet, read the article about kayaking the southern Gulf Islands right now!

*Also I'm excited to announce that my essay, Once More to Wire Lake, is going to be published in Literary Mama's Father's Day Issue. I have literally been trying to write this essay since I was about 12 years old. This is my fourth version of it and I finally got it right. It's all about my family's adventures in the high Sierras when I was a wee lass, focusing particularly on my dad's motivation for bringing us there.

*For National Poetry Month, I recited one of my favorite poems for Richard Hugo House, which is posting a poem a day on YouTube for the month of April. The best part of it is that Snuffy, my oh-so-literary pug was part of the proceedings. Check out my video now, or look at Joe Lambert's Hugo House blog to see all of them!

*I'm hard at work on my novel for middle readers, and though it's going slowly (what else is new?) it is going!

*My spring Hugo House class, Roughing It: Write a Draft of Your Book in Six Weeks, is filled to the brim with eager writers ready for the masochistic challenge of writing a book-length manuscript in just over a month. I will be encouraging them with wine and chocolate. Thanks to student, and writer in his own right, Evan Peterson for the shout-out in his blog, Poemocracy.