Writing a novel while your baby sleeps

It started with JK Rowling who famously wrote Harry Potter in cafes in Edinbugh while her new baby slept. There's always someone writing a first-time novel while on maternity leave. I just want to write a first-time novella for fourth graders. Haven't gotten to that yet. But I have canva, pinterest, a nostalgia for 1970s kitchens, and a baby who sleeps only long enough to create little memes and blogposts.

I love this kitchen. I also love her sweater and high-waited jeans.

I was never even in one like this, but feel like the Eight Is Enough household had something similar. My best friend Ann and I still reminiscence about the 1970s kitchen in the house she grew up in -- the avocado fridge, the avocado stove, the avocado linoleum floors. The yellow rotary phone on the wall above a little desk (avocado countertops), next to a bulletin board with weekly reminders and a University Bookstore calendar affixed to the wall. We spent many afterschool afternoons-into-evening times in there - snacking, talking, listening to Depeche Mode and Erasure, talking. The seasons changed out the window, the yellow formica table became a rather sleek, tall wooden table with barstool type seats. But it was always the 1970s kitchen, open to all the teenage angst and hunger that came its way.

photo source found on the blog http://www.retrospace.org/2010/05/that-70s-home-3-kitchen-preservation.html

meme by lil old me

A feeling of feelings

Daughter are a band I became acquainted with when I was handed their album 'If You Leave' during my first week at Inertia. It isn't quite dark-and-stormy-night music as it is moody-as-night-falls music, which is really one of my favourite kinds.

I saw the band play at the Metro over a year ago and found the lead singer, Elena, so endearing to the audience of primarily young women her same age and probably feeling a lot of the same things: an onslaught of thoughts about the future, the fury and excitement of the present, while still making sense of the recent past.

we are the reckless / we are the wild youth / chasing visions of our futures

from "Youth"

I felt older than most at the concert, but my 24-year-old self was there in spirit. My present-day mum self also thought, "Wow, her parents must be proud."

So with the new single "Doing The Right Thing," I look forward to more unleashing of those mid-to-late twenties kinds songs that need to see the light of day…or the dark of evening.

And then you are back

My month back in Madison has come and gone. I have been up since 5am, which isn't as bad as jet-lagged induced 3:30am yesterday morning. Those not quite morning, not quite night times give space to come up with such brilliant thoughts that coming back is strange because you have traveled so far, waited so long for your trip and then just like that - you are back in your bed with the same sheets, the same plates out in the kitchen cupboard, the same old hedge out front needing a trim again. But that other place is so, so recent. I took this photo on my morning run the day we left for Sydney. 

The sidewalk is a little path between two houses on the middle of quiet Ravenswood Drive that takes you into Pilgrim Park. Everything is still pretty green there but splotches of yellow, purple and red are creeping in. And Pilgrim Park is so quiet. I ran through there maybe 5 or 6 times in three and a half weeks and never saw another person there. I used to play there a lot when I was little but it seems on weekdays in Madison there just aren't many kids around.

I did notice how it used to be that you could see McKenna Blvd from the park - a busy residential street. But now the trees are so tall they make a lovely , lush leafy wall...for a little while longer until the leaves fall.