Childhood adventures

This morning at breakfast we were talking about our earliest memories.  The kids were completely unimpressed with mine.  I was standing next to a bed, and there was a baby on the bed.  That's it.  So, yeah, they were right to be unimpressed.  I think I'm only about two years old, though, based on the height of the bed and such.

Jacob's earliest memories are awesome.  He remembers sitting in a high chair obliterating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while his dad played guitar a few feet away.  I was teasing him about his parents keeping him in a high chair until he was six, but he also remembers being handed off into his grandmother's arms, so I think Jacob wins for having the earliest memories.  My memories of being carried are all me begging and being told, "No, Amy, you're too big to pick up."  I was a rather sturdy child, but more on that later.

Mindy's earliest memories are from preschool, also at three or four years old.  She remembers having to take naps and being bored out of her mind.  She remembers playing quietly in the corner while the other kids learned words she already knew.  She also remembers having to remind the teacher that a universe is bigger than a galaxy.  Ah, nerd memories!

Isaac remembers his first night sleeping in a big bed instead of a toddler bed.  He was probably three or four years old.  He says he woke up when he rolled out and hit his head.  "There was some blood, but only a little bit."  I have no recollection of this at all, so here's yet more evidence of my lousy mothering skills.

Speaking of mothers not knowing what their kids are up to . . .

I've always been a fan of eating, and when I was a kid I sneaked a lot of food.  I'm assuming my mom is well aware of this since every bag of cookies always had just one left in it.  (I couldn't finish the whole bag.  Then people would KNOW.)

When I was eight years old I tried to make a cupcake.  I put a reduced amount of the ingredients from the Betty Crocker cookbook into a cupcake liner and mixed it up as best I could.  There was still a lot of egg yolk and such, but it's hard to mix well in a paper liner.  Then I stuck it into the microwave.  It didn't work well, and the smell was awful.  I threw away the "cupcake" in the garbage outside and sprayed the house liberally with Lysol, but when mom came home a few minutes later I had to 'fess up.

However, one time when I was home alone I decided I wanted to make donuts and pulled out the trusty Betty Crocker cookbook.  I managed to heat up a pan full of oil and make up some dough, but they didn't turn out right and the oil popped like crazy.  Somehow I managed to clean up all the evidence, or so I thought.  The next day my mom asked what the burns were from on my arms.  I, of course, feigned ignorance, so to this day she probably thinks one of my friends' parents was putting out cigarettes on my arms.  No, Mom, I'd just gotten marginally smarter since the cupcake incident.

I love it when a plan comes together

I mentioned in my blog post yesterday that I was considering deleting chapter seventeen of Ravenswood.  While reading through the novel again I get to that chapter and it is so boring and stupid that I can't even make myself read it, so pointless that I think I can delete it and have the rest of the book make perfect sense.  It's kind of like when you watch the deleted scenes on a DVD and think, "Well, duh.  Why did you shoot that scene in the first place?"

Unfortunately, if I remove that chapter then the novel, which was already on the short side, officially becomes a novella.  I don't want a novella.  I want a novel.

So I've been taking advantage of the insomnia due to oxycodone withdrawal (fun times!) to try to come up with some way to fill out the novel without just stuffing it full of rice like a cheap burrito.  I can't get around the fact that I'm going to have to make more happen.

Some of you have read a draft of the whole novel.  Although there have been lots of positive comments,  everyone has also made it clear that I do not end the novel well.  I improved it some, but it still leaves you hanging (sorry).  Some of you also know that I already started a sequel to Ravenswood.  It seemed like a priority since I ended the first one so unsatisfactorily.

This morning I came up with the solution to my dilemma, which suddenly seemed so obvious that I can't believe it took me this long.  I'm going to tighten the remaining chapters of the first book (except chapter seventeen which is going into the garbage because I never want to see it again) and continue into what I've written on the sequel, which is pretty exciting, if I do say so myself.  If I can get the conflict in the sequel to blend well into what was the end of the first novel, it will actually do a better job of completing the story arc.  I even have a spreadsheet of the major conflicts and their resolutions so I can check that I'm following each through every act of the novel.  (I am, after all, an accountant.  I know how to make things tie out.)

What's funny to me (and probably only to me) is that the original climax to the novel is currently in the middle, and now what was, to me, the new climax of the novel is going to be in the middle, as well.  This sucker just keeps growing.

What is less funny is that I now have another 25,000 to 30,000 words to write and a lot of reorganizing to do.  It's kind of like thinking you finished building the shed and deciding instead to make it the entry of a nice vacation cabin.

Another thing I've realized is that after Piper cuts her own bangs in chapter two that she really looks pretty emo.  This was unintentional, but now that she looks like that I can't get her to change back.  So annoying.

Incorporating the sequel is also going to bring in a guy who wears vintage clothes and skinny pants and probably a scarf.  Believe it or not, I really don't have anything to do with these decisions.

I'd better get back to writing.  I have a LOT of work to do.

It would be smarter not to write

When I was eight years old I wrote what was probably my first complete story.  My mom worked at my school, and in the afternoons I'd hang out in her room, waiting for a ride home.  Her room was full of fun things like two doves in a cage, lots of computers, and a binding machine.

I think it was the binding machine that really did it for me.  I wrote "Lindsey of Asia," cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate it, and bound it neatly.  I probably still have that thing in a box in the garage somewhere.

My mom was torn between delight and horror, since the incorrigible Miss Lindsey ended up in Asia when she ran away from home because her father (the president of the United States) was mean and neglectful.  I don't think I even gave my heroine a mother.  After reading it, my mom wondered where she'd gone wrong.

We had a poetry contest in third grade.  The theme was careers, and I wrote about being an inventor (more a mad scientist, really) and having my toes blown off.  I won the contest, and my teacher carefully copied the somewhat gruesome poem out in calligraphy.

I won more writing competitions over the years, including one for a short story in college, and one about ten years ago for compiling the worst paragraph possible.  Looking back, I think that awful paragraph I wrote was some of my best work.

Which brings me to my thought for the day: do I write simply because I was encouraged at a young age?  If I hadn't had that silly inventor poem copied into calligraphy, if I hadn't been stuck in a classroom for hours with a binding machine, if I hadn't been forced, like all children my age, to keep a journal in class, would I have this unfortunate writing addiction?

Yes, I do mean unfortunate.

Because writing sucks up time and attention.

Because writing reveals too much of what's inside my head (and even when it doesn't, my mother assumes it does).

Because writing exposes me to rejection and generous quantities of self-doubt.

This week I've been revising Ravenswood for the bazillionth time, and it rips me apart.  On one hand, I love the thing.  I get sucked into that world and want to stay and wander around.  On the other hand, there are parts of it I hate. For instance, some of the characters are flat as flounders (I despise them), and I think I might need to delete chapter 17 entirely.

I doubt there will ever be a point at which I can say, "I'm done.  This is my best work."

Which is why on days like this I think it would be smarter not to write.

Making Compromises

Mindy is upstairs weeping right now, and it's my fault.

Today is the Bible Challenge.  This is Isaac's second year competing, and it's his first year having put any real effort into preparing for it. I know he's going to do a wonderful job, and I really, really want to be there to see it.  However, I am kidding myself if I think my body can handle not only an hour round-trip in the car to get there, but hours of waiting while the competition is going on.  I'm hoping to take my last oxycodone this weekend, not start popping them every three hours again.

So I came up with a compromise.  Isaac will hitch a ride with his cousin, then we'll go this afternoon to watch the individual competition and see the awards ceremony.  What a great solution, right?  It'll still be rough on my body, but hopefully not too much to handle.  It's also better for Jacob, who has several commitments all afternoon and evening.

But Mindy is heartbroken.  She wants to go and hang out with the older kids like she did last year.  She wants to watch all the games and questions and pretend she's a part of it.

I made my daughter cry, just like I've had to so many other times.  They should tell you that before you have kids.  They should say, "You're about to have a little person that looks exactly like you.  You will love them in a way you've never imagined, and you are going to have to disappoint them and watch them cry, knowing it's your fault."

It is in this mood I share with you a link to a song off of Brandi Carlile's new album Bear Creek (via Paste Magazine).  The song is "That Wasn't Me," and it's beautiful and heart-wrenching, like most of her music.

Maybe that's what I can tell Mindy: when I make you cry, that wasn't me.

It's going to be okay, anyway.  I can hear her giggling in her room upstairs with her dad.

This post is not about money

Like all good unpublished writers in this day of modern technology, I'm strongly considering self-publishing.  Even though I still dream of seeing my glossy cover on the bookshelf, I also like the idea of just getting the sucker out there.

On the one hand, traditional publishing does the marketing and finish work for you.  However, I may rot and die before I manage to get anywhere near a traditional publisher.  I also really like the idea of publishing my work electronically or print-on-demand so there aren't cases and cases of books being printed and then sitting around languishing in a warehouse somewhere.  That is so wasteful!

Although self-publishing could get my work out there faster, I wouldn't have the comfort of an editor and would have to do so much work!  Any of you who have an e-reader of any kind know that electronic books can have absolutely appalling formatting.  I don't want to put out a product that looks like crap, which means learning how to do a quality formatting job for a variety of e-readers.

That is almost as boring to me as funding my kids' college education.

So while I argue with myself about whether to self-publish or not, you can read the first chapter of Ravenswood.  My father-in-law thought I should post some of my writing on my blog, and I thought that was a great idea.  The best part is that it forced me to read it over again, and I made quite a lot of changes.  (Really, an editor would be a nice thing to have.)   Perhaps by the end of the summer I'll put the whole novel through it's tenth revision and get the Kindle version up on Amazon.com.

I hope you enjoy!

Interesting follow-up to college savings post

Okay, this might only be interesting to me.

Last week I wrote on my blind panic at the thought of college savings.  I didn't discuss this in my previous post,  but while I haven't invested much, I have been investing in a college savings plan for my son since he was a toddler.  We have an Oregon 529 plan for him, and were planning to add one for Mindy and start investing more into both since, you know, time is of the essence and all that.

However, Isaac now has just slightly more in his 529 plan than we have invested.  That's pretty pathetic, actually.  Managing to merely recoup our losses after nearly a decade of investing?  I wouldn't call that a good track record.  Yes, there were some rough years in there for the stock market, but our 401(k)s have performed much better. (Especially mine because it was inadvertently all transferred into a cash account right before the stock market crashed in 2008.  I still giggle whenever I think about it.)

So I have been reticent to fling more money at what has been a losing investment thus far.

Then this morning I was reading some articles online and came across Brent Hunsberger's It's Only Money column for today.  Apparently the Oregon 529 plan has been given a 5-cap rating by savingforcollege.com.

This is a sea-change from the bad press that the plan got a few years ago, when the state sued OppenheimerFunds for mismanagement of the plan's assets.  In 2008 when similar funds lost about 5% of their value, the Oppenheimer Core Bond Fund lost 35.5% of its value.  Ouch!

Bonds are supposed to be safe, boring investments. Investors expect to make very little money, but feel safe that their investment is not at risk.  This is where you put your child's college fund they are getting close to graduating from high school.  So for this bond fund to lose nearly half of its value, from $10.15 in May 2008 to $5.36 in March 2009 was a nightmare to families who thought they were being wise to save for college.  You expect to get whacked like this occasionally if you're invested in stocks, but not when you need that money for your kid's tuition in the fall.

In late 2009, OppenheimerFunds agreed to pay investors $20 million, over half of what they'd lost, and in 2010 the Oregon College Savings Plan changed management to TIAA-CREF, and they've been working on reducing fees ever since.

What do I do?  Do I trust the new, improved Oregon College Savings Plan and start saving more for the kids' college education?  Do I hunt down another investment?  Or do I just stick my head back into a hole and not think about it?  For the moment, I'm going to not think about it.  After all, tomorrow is another day.

The Ticking Time Bomb

The other day I was chatting with my mom, and the subject of investing came up.  My mom said, "At least your kids have college funds."  Awkward silence while I let the waves of guilt crash over me.

"Mom, only Isaac has a college fund, and he doesn't even have enough for a semester."

To be fair, we've only recently gotten our financial house in order, so to speak.  We had a money pit of a house in Portland that was heavily mortgaged.  We finally sold it for a pittance two years ago, and only paid off the loan on that house last summer.  I finally paid off the last of my student loans last fall.

However, Isaac will be eleven in August, and Mindy is hot on his heels.  2019 looms in front of me like financial Armageddon, but even though one of my favorite hobbies is financial forecasting (I am a CPA, remember), I don't spend much time thinking about college funding.  I don't know if it's just boring to me or if I'm in such a blind panic that it's better not to think about it.  College funding has the same effect on me as when Jacob talks about his IT work.  My eyes glaze over and my brain shuts down and I wake up a few minutes later not knowing quite what's going on.

My son goes to college in just over 7 years.

I was thinking that Pepperdine University would be such a nice place for the kids to go.  It's a Christian school with a very good reputation in a nice location there on the beach in Malibu.  What a nice campus to visit, and the kids could go away to school and only be a thousand miles away!  So I went to their website.

Did you know that the annual cost of attending Pepperdine is more than $50,000 per year, and they haven't updated their cost estimator since 2009?!?!

Blind panic.

Okay, so perhaps Pepperdine is a bad idea.  Who wants to go to LA, anyway?

I looked at the cost of attending my alma mater, Harding University.  It's more than 2,000 miles away and the location is, well, Arkansas, but the annual cost is less than half of Pepperdine.  Okay, so maybe it's not the best campus to visit.  There's no sunny Pacific Ocean, no bustling metropolis, no sterling reputation.  But it's affordable.


Then there's Portland State University, where I did my post-baccalaureate accounting studies.  It's about $10,000 a year for tuition, and the kids could live at home.  Admittedly, it's not as cool as living in Malibu, but through the lenses of cost PSU starts looking downright shiny, doesn't it?

Or they could go to Clackamas Community College and ride their bikes to class every day.  I hope it doesn't come to this, but thank heavens for community colleges, right?  Jacob and I have both taken classes at community colleges and the modest expense is a life-saver.

I know that there is financial aid available.  Hopefully my kids will keep their grades up and get lots of scholarships, but I doubt they'll qualify for need-based financial aid.  I thought about retiring early so we're broke when the kids go to college, but considering I'll be barely forty, I can't see that being a wise option.

The most common methods of college savings (other than pretending it's not going to happen) are 529 plans and educational savings accounts.  529 plans behave a lot like a Roth IRA.  The money is put in after taxes, the growth and income are tax-free, and the money can be withdrawn tax-free as long as the distributions are used for qualified educational expenses (college).  One of the nicest things about a 529 plan is that the money in the plan still belongs to the person who invested it (me).  If your kid turns out to not be college material, you stick their younger sibling's name on the account and pretend it was theirs all along.

Educational savings accounts are a lot like 529s, but they lost their shininess after 529 plans came along, mostly because the contribution limits have been pretty low and the money in the plan belongs to the beneficiary.  However, at least the way the law stands right this minute (I think), you can use the distributions for educational expenses even before college: private school tuition, for example.

So, how am I going to save for my kids' college education?

Uh . . . . . .

. . .

. . .

Huh?  What?  Sorry.  I must have blacked out for a minute there.  What were we talking about?