Yes, I’m a day late and a dollar short. Nothing unusual there. But since yesterday was Mother’s Day, I thought I’d check in with my latest parenting revelation.

No, it has nothing to do with discipline or how to let a teenager know you still love him when all he wants to do is slam the door in your face and watch movies. Nope. No such wisdom from me. Instead, I am here strictly to freak out.

My oldest is only one inch shorter than me.

Now this is not saying a lot, I realize, since I ain’t the tallest mountain in the range. However, it adds to the low-level dread I feel whenever I think of him turning 13 in June. Yes, I will be the mother of a teenager. Of course, I really already am (see the door slamming reference above) since the hormones hit a good year ago, but to think I gave birth to my first child 13 years ago! Yes, I feel old now. And before fall I bet I’m looking up at the little snot. Big snot. Whatever.

Which leads to the realization of the inevitable - I am going to be the shortest person in the house very soon. Our second son, when he was three months old, stretched to a height beyond measuring on the doctor’s charts. “I’d say 99th percentile for height,” the pediatrician told me at the time. “If he keeps up like this, six-six or six-seven at adulthood.”

My five-foot-four little self shrunk a little that day. And the third one is just like him. So within five years, I will be looking up at my boys. Good news is I have experience doing that and still looking scary. Had to do it when I was teaching once upon a time; chewed out a six-foot-something teenaged kid who’d just screwed up royally. And somehow I intimidated him. Imagine how scary I can be with thirteen years of parenting under my belt.

Yeah, look at the little elf screaming her head off. That’s me.

In book news, sent out a few more queries last week on LET’S DISH and actually wrote more on HAPPY MEDIUM. With the Evil Day Job not being so evil at the moment, more energy goes to writing. Yay! The bad news? Yard work starts soon. Always something, huh?

It’s only been a hundred years in the making, but I finally updated the site, including a excerpt of Guys and Dogs!

With life calming down at work, I might even be able to work on Happy Medium this week. Maybe. I still have that old nasty thing called housework. Yick!

Yesterday it got up over 70 degrees here. Not unusual for the end of April. Today we’re under a winter storm warning. Last Friday we had a blizzard. Saturday is supposed to be near 80.

Is it any wonder the kids are all getting sick? People don’t know whether to have pneumonia or hay fever.

I grew up in Wyoming, where they say if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes. Apparently the same is true in South Dakota.

But I do have a minor celebration. One year after the flood, I am officially done with my basement! Put the finishing touches on the bathroom last weekend, and all I need to do now is buy a rug. It’s a done deal! Which means I can move on to the upstairs, which is what I had originally planned to do last summer. Ah, the joys of the local weather.

Yep, I’m whining. And here’s some more:

Evil day job has tapped my energy lately, so I have a total of one scene written on HAPPY MEDIUM. The good news is that it is cranking away in my brain, so if and when I ever do get a chance to sit down and actually write it, at least the first bit should come fairly easily. I hope.

Pics of the new bath coming soon, as well as a taste of HM, I hope. In the meantime, happy spring! But don’t put away those shovels just yet.

Sooner or later I knew my life would turn into a musical. Wasn’t exactly expecting it to be Oklahoma, but whatever. And, as usual, the cosmos has not given me the leading role of the lovely Laurie, but instead I am relegated to quirky side-kick status. But unlike Ado Annie, it’s not men I’m tripping over but volunteer work.

It came to my attention this weekend when I ran around the mall in what I like to call my Goober Suit (there is a reason they a BOY scout uniforms - the women leaders look like idiots in them). I had my arms full of pinewood derby cars and ran into a guy I know peripherally from work. “A woman of many talents,” he said.  No, I told him. Just can’t say no.

We were doing the local Scout-o-Rama, running the pinewood derby race, and it occurred to me as he walked away that, while I had volunteered to fill in where needed, at that moment my name was listed as doing two jobs and I had been promised that hour off to get lunch and show the kid around to the other booths. But there I was running cars back and forth from the registration table to the staging area. A warm body was needed, and I was it.

I do this a lot. Need a job done? Cate’ll do it. Need another committee member? Cate’ll do it. Need a chaperon for the dance? Cate’ll do it. I’m actually on the board of a couple of grants, but I forget all of them.  I am that much of a doormat.

The other day, though, another mother of a special needs child ran into me in the PIzza Hut parking lot. “You really want to be on the Partners in Policymaking board, don’t you?”

“I do?” I asked, trying desperately to think of a way to weasel out of it.

She spent the next few minutes spelling out what they do, how parent advocates work, etc. Sounded like interesting information, but stuff I already know through my job. My job! I had an excuse!

“You know,” I said, breaking it to her gently, “I know my boss wouldn’t object, but I think it might bring up conflict of interest issues.”

Yes, she could see that. I had successfully talked my way off being on another board. Yay! Take that, Ado Annie!

And I have a better singing voice, too.

Just a quick post to let you all know about a wonderful program through, of all places, VH1. Go buy this:

Support Autism research and get a really cool shirt, to boot. Now how cool is that?

UPDATE: Sorry, I have tried and tried and the stupid link isn’t working right. Go HERE to buy the shirt.

81,500 words by page count, just over 68K by actual word count. Funny how those two numbers are always so far apart. At any rate, GUYS AND DOGS is done. Or as done as a first draft can get. Now I need to edit it, write a synopsis and a query letter. Sigh… done is so not done. But at least it’s written.

GUYS AND DOGS is almost done. We’re talking less than fifty pages, most likely. Well, unless I get wordy. And I never get wordy. Oh no.  The problem is not writing the pages, though - it’s what to put on them.

I laid in bed the other night trying to think like my antagonist. He’s got to finish this thing out with some desperate act, but how desperate? Then there’s the whole, “Is it believable?” problem. Fiction allows for some suspension of disbelief, but not if you break character or, as I’m afraid of doing, going too far.

So I took the question to my writing buddies, who are very lovely, bright women but really couldn’t give me an answer, having not read the last several chapters of my story yet. Still, they had a feeling that where I was going was tearing it. Since I had the question to begin with, I obviously agree. Too bad, too, because I could have had the sucker finished by now.

I actually talked to my mother about this the other night on the phone, as well. Yes, the same woman who lovingly reminds me at least once a month that I’m not yet published. But she was amazingly open to discussing my little problem, and offered up many examples of good guys gone bad - or even semi creepy guys like my antagonist going postal. So could what I was thinking of doing actually happen in real life? Yes, we decided, and it has happened in real life. Which is actually quite sad, since what I was thinking he might do is very dark and terrible. Not that he was going to succeed, but…

Yes, I’m being cryptic, mostly because I think what I will end up with as a final solution will at least have elements of my original idea in it. I know what I want to happen right before I type THE END, but the trick is getting there in a believable fashion that won’t leave the reader saying, “Where the hell did that come from?”  Ahh, the joys of being a pantser and not a plotter.

By the way, quick recommendation (and not because she’s a wonderful friend, either): I have recently discovered Samantha Graves, whose terrific book SIGHT UNSEEN I read while at Mayo this month. I read it because I had come to know her through another friend, but was hooked from page one. And I am a notoriously hard sell in the first chapters of books. She also writes under the name C.J. Berry, so those books are my next stop. She’s a huge plotter, too, so I bet she’s not left at the end of a book saying, “So how do I end this?” Ah, I’ll have to forgive her for that.

Man, that’s the story of my life, isn’t it? And everyone I know. Life gets in the way of writing all the time. Either it’s the kids or the day job or whatnot. This month for me, it’s been the kids. But in a good way.

Son #1 participated in his first Special Olympics State Basketball Tournament last weekend, and boy did he have fun. Even shot the ball at the hoop. He’s not the most aggressive player, but that doesn’t matter. We got home Sunday night in time to unpack one suitcase and re-pack the next to head to Mayo Clinic the next day.

As an aside here, I actually love the drive to Rochester. We have 4-lane highway all the way and I get to catch up on my “reading” - that is if the library has the book I want on CD. This time I got the listen to a Rex Stout mystery (oh how I love Archie Goodwin) and finally was able to “read” the first of the OUTLANDER series by Diana Gabaldon. A friend of mine has been at me to read this book for years, and I have to say I would recommend it. Even my kids loved it, though there were a couple times I had to hit the mute button. I’ve never been one for steamy sex scenes myself, so that wasn’t a big loss.

Anyway, so we went to Mayo and spent one exhausting day there, but the news is good and Son #3 (whose non-cancerous brain tumor we were following up on) is looking very good indeed, and can back off on visits to the clinic to every two years! Yay!

So on the drive home, I tried to think about my ending for GUYS AND DOGS. I really need to finish that sucker. But the mind wandering that is required to form plot (for me, anyway) brought me back to what happened three years ago that got me side tracked to begin with. Up to that point, I was pumping out a couple books a year. Since then, I struggled with MURDER IN F MINOR for nearly two years until I finally chucked it, and am struggling to get to the finish line on G&D. Why?

Well, three years ago, my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I didn’t realize it until we were talking to his neurologist this last week, but there’s definitely a connection. It took us a few months to get everything diagnosed and realize that it was most likely non-cancerous. I thought I handled it pretty well at the time and, overall, I still do. But what went to hell? My writing.

When I first started writing again after I gave it up in college, it was magazine articles about epilepsy and autism - all the things we were dealing with for Son #1. But when Son #3 started having a health concern, I shut down. I don’t know what that means, but maybe now that I’ve figured it out, I can finally get back in the saddle properly.

People have told me I should write a memoir about my eldest, but I resist. I have the first couple chapters written, actually, but I don’t think I can do justice to the subject. I’m too close. Perhaps one day I will be able to articulate what it’s like to live with a special needs child, but right now I just need to concentrate on doing it. And before I get a bunch of praise for being a strong person (and you know who you are those of you who tell me that), I must say I’m not. Honestly, the kid’s kinda fun to have around and, save a Special Olympics schedule that’s going to kill me, he’s not a lot to deal with. Oh, there is the adolescence thing, but that’s inevitable.

I did bring one more thing home from Mayo, by the way: a lovely case of bronchitis. Just one more thing to work in to the end of G&D, I guess.

I think some time ago I confessed that a few friends and I were going to do a NaNo sprint in March. It’s March now, right? And no, I’m not sprinting. In fact, this blog is the closest thing to writing I’ve done all week.

The good news about this is that none of my friends are sprinting right now, either. Fininshing up projects and other whatnot has put off our sprint until April, for which I’m grateful since March is getting very busy very quickly with the kids. And I still have to finish G&D.

I managed to do a once-over on what I wrote during November NaNo, but face it - it’s like putting spackle over hurricane damage. It’s too little and too cheap when you really need to tear down the drywall and start over. (Why are my analogies all about home improvement now?) But I digress - as usual. The problem is the book still needs an ending. I know where I want to go, I just can’t seem to get there. My hero needs more scenes, and he’s not talking to me. The turkey’s been like that since the start. The antagonist yapped at me on and on, proud of what a slime-o he was. But the hero? He’s this modest, quiet guy. Which is wonderful for my heroine, but not so good for me. Right now he seems really weak, and he needs a lot of work. So the trick is to get the sucker done by April so I can write my new book.

So, in the interest of inspiring myself (and perhaps someone else out there), my placeholder for Travis:

There. Maybe now he’ll talk to me!

Ever say something stupid in public? Ever do something goofy, or fall on your butt on the ice with everyone watching? Me, too. In fact, I think I’m the Queen of Foot-in-Mouth. My yapper is always going off before my brain kicks in, generally in a lame attempt at humor. Mind you, it works more often than it doesn’t, but when it doesn’t work, it tends to crash to the ground like the proverbial lead balloon. (The Mythbusters proved you can make a lead balloon fly, by the way, but that’s another blog.)

So why is this such a big deal for me? Because I can’t let it go. I’m serious. I will lay in bed at night and torture myself reliving something incredibly stupid I said fourteen years ago. Yes, I have a specific incident in mind when I say that. There was also once at a wedding when the usher offered me his arm, and I took hold of it just opposite of the way a lady is supposed to. That was about sixteen years ago, but notice I can still recall the exact details. So stupid to fuss over, but I do it. In fact, I can think back to a Christmas party my parents had when I was about ten where I said something that was misconstrued by a guest. I was deathly embarrassed, so I drag that one up to beat myself with on occasion.

So am I the only one who will do this? Am I the only one who will be worrying about something, get distracted by something, then come back and say to myself, “Now what was I stressing about?” This has got to be the sign of some pathology. That’s right - I believe I am certifiably insane. I have to be to be a writer, right?

And why can’t I think about all the good things I’ve done. I saved a little girl from choking once. The Heimlich really works, by the way. I’m a fairly decent parent. I am good at my job, and can make people laugh. Yes, even typing that short list makes me cringe. I feel arrogant putting my strengths out there. My weaknesses, though - hell, we can dwell on those for days.

Is this being a woman, I wonder? Or is it being raised with a double-helping of the guilt complex? Or am I really clinically nuts? Call it what you will, but I do think it brings me one advantage in my chosen avocation (hopefully one day vocation) - I can torture the heck out of my characters. I do it to myself every day.