Kim Neville

Dear Daughter,

Today is your fifth birthday. Before you were born, I spent a lot of time wondering what sort of person I was growing inside of me. I had wishes, of course, an idealistic dream of the child you’d be and the adult you’d grow up to become. If I were the three good fairies in Sleeping Beauty, the traits I would have blessed upon you are these: curiosity, strength and joy.

Why curiosity? Because it’s one of the things I always liked about myself and I hoped we would share it. It also tends to go hand in hand with an open mind, a tolerant heart and a love for lifelong learning, all of which are important to me.

Your eyes were open and alert the moment you were put in my arms at 20 minutes old. You’ve been hungry for knowledge ever since. At one, you made me read an alphabet book to you over and over again until you knew all your letters. After that came the numbers book. You could count to twenty and recognize a handful of words before you were two.

You adore numbers still. You’re in your second year of preschool and can add double digits in your head. You’ve begun to learn multiplication. You’ve never once gotten tired of reading with me, not after five books or ten. I can read until I lose my voice and you’ll still ask for one more chapter.

We spend a lot of time explaining how things work. Plumbing. Birds. Gravity. At every piano lesson you beg your teacher to let you look inside the piano again. You haven’t quite figured out the mechanics and you likely won’t stop harassing her until you have.

I love teaching you and I love learning with you. Promise me you’ll never stop asking questions and I promise I’ll never stop doing my best to answer them.

Strength was the trait I worried about most. Would you be confident and decisive like your father? Or would you follow in my footsteps? Fear and anxiety were my constant companions as a child. I didn’t want that for you.

Already, at five, you know yourself. Even when you’re changing your mind for the third time, you’re definite about it. You know what you want and you’re not afraid to ask for it. You’re an expert negotiator and you love to argue your case. Some people would call this defiant; I call it resourceful. You’re already a better problem solver than most adults I know.

You’re also constantly pushing boundaries. It’s exhausting. But even when I’m frustrated I love your stubbornness. I didn’t learn how to speak my mind until I was in my thirties. I hope your strength continues to grow as you do.

That’s two of my three wishes for you come true. All that’s left is joy.

No one who’s met you would doubt your joyfulness. There’s the jumping, for one thing. I don’t know anyone who jumps more than you do. It’s often accompanied by hand flapping, giggling, shouting, dancing and singing. You love to sing, songs you’ve learned and songs you make up on the spot. It’s not unusual for you to fall asleep singing, or to wake up singing.

Then there’s the face. You’ve been making it since you were about a year old. When you get excited, you make fists. They pop up beside your head and shake, and your mouth opens wide and your eyes squeeze shut. The joy bubbles up and out and it’s so intense that you can’t stop the face from happening. It’s funny and infectious and wonderful, and you make it several times a day because there are so many things in this world that bring you joy. Balloons. Yam rolls. Running into a friend at the corner store. Cherry blossoms.

I hope you are still making that face when you’re 95. Your joy lifts everyone in your presence. It lifts me every day. And for that I am more grateful than you’ll ever know.

Happy birthday, my beautiful girl.

I’m so excited to share this news. This summer I’ll be joining 17 other sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers in Seattle for an intensive six-week writing workshop. Clarion West is taught by top professional authors and editors in the SF community. Many alumni have called it a life-changing experience and I’m grateful to have been selected to participate. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, I’ve got lots of reading to do, along with some research and brainstorming. I also plan to spend as much time as possible with my little girl, because by far the hardest part of all this will be six weeks of missing her.

Although it’s not been very spring-like in Vancouver this week, the flowers haven’t been deterred by hailstorms or snow flurries and, at our house at least, there’s been a rush of renewal and excitement. Reconnections with old friends and estranged family members. Shiny New Things on the horizon. Release of the first two episodes of The Legend of Korra and The Hunger Games movie (!) on the same weekend. Daffodils!

So many lovely distractions. It’s enough to keep a writer from finishing that pesky old first draft.

I’m approximately 88.5% done. Next week I will finish. I have blogged it, and so it will be.

I’m almost done the first draft of as-yet-unnamed changeling novel. And I’m reluctant to get to the end. Not sure why. Maybe because once I do I’ll have to acknowledge the messiness and incompleteness of what I’ve made. That while I may have arrived at the story’s end, I’m far from finished.

I’ve used a few disruptions to my routine as excuses to put off the work. It’s been almost a week since I’ve written a word. As a result, I am grumpy. Because the only thing worse than slogging through the last ten thousand words is not doing so and missing my deadline. I hate letting myself down.

So. Enough grumbling. Back to work.

A while ago at preschool my daughter was learning to tie bows. That day was a birthday for one of the other children and the class was gathering for a celebration. When the teacher asked if my daughter would like to join in, she said no.

“If I’m going to get this right,” she said, “I’ve got to practice.”

I love that kid.

It’s not hard to figure out where she learned this. Just go read my husband’s excellent blog post on choosing your work. It got me thinking about practice and how the concept of “work” has gotten a bad reputation.

My daughter goes to a Montessori preschool. Every day the children are expected to choose their own work. And yes, they call it work. Whether it’s fitting together puzzles or playing bells or polishing silver, it’s purposeful activity — i.e., work.

I’m so glad my daughter is learning early to value work. The prevailing attitude in our culture seems to be that it’s a necessary evil. You go to your job and put in your time so you can collect a paycheque, pay the bills and get on with life. Life — the stuff that happens outside of work.

In our house, work is inextricably linked with home. There is no “life” outside of work. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. My husband is an indie game developer and a consultant. The bulk of his work happens at home. I work part-time outside the home and I write at home whenever I can: while my daughter’s in school, in the evenings, on weekends.

Our work earns us money, of course, but it also brings us personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. When I tell people I work every Saturday, I get grimaces in return. (And yeah, some Saturdays I’d rather be at the beach. But I try to keep a balance between the beach days and the writing ones.) I suppose if I said I was writing a novel I’d get a different reaction.

Except writing is work. It’s hard. It’s also important to me. Calling it work gives it more weight. It signals to me and to others that what I’m doing is serious.

Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s unpleasant. Learning to knit or play ukelele is work. Growing an herb garden is work. Training for a marathon is work.

Anything worth doing requires work.

My daughter is still practicing her bows. They’re tricky, but she’s almost got them down. And, for the record, she did concede to a birthday cookie that day (she’s not a complete ascetic).

Now if only my family (me included) could extend our healthy attitude towards work to include house-cleaning.

The other day I realized I reached a milestone in my writing journey without noticing.

When I began my first novel, published authors seemed impossibly brilliant to me. How did they hold novel-sized stories in their brains? I couldn’t fathom it. This is evident in my first draft and in the second and third drafts, too. I wrote like I was driving in the dark with the headlights on, seeing only what was directly in front of me. I revised the same way.

Not anymore. Sometime over the year year my mind expanded. It all fits. The whole story, all the characters and their various backstories and motivations. I can hop from the middle to the end and back to the beginning without flipping wildly through my stack of notecards.

Mind you, I’m not brilliant yet. The notecards are essential for keeping track of all the little details. And the writing still isn’t easy. But it’s easier than last time. And all it took was practice: the process of beginning and finishing, of studying the craft and then beginning again.

My brain grew. How cool is that? It makes me feel powerful. It reminds me of the potential we all have to continue to grow and learn, to get smarter and stronger. It reminds me to keep reaching because all those hours I’ve put in do matter. They made a difference. They made me better.

I’m sick today and weighed down with a decision. The decision is one of the best kind — a choice between a situation that is already perfectly lovely and one that would be just as lovely or, maybe, even more so.

Despite a win-win situation, I am stressed out. Decision-making is not one of my strengths. I’d like someone else to choose for me, which may be why I’ve been spamming my friends and family looking for advice.

To remind myself that all is, in fact, quite well, I thought I would find three things that make me smile and put them here. (Confession: I visit my own blog a lot. It’s where I put things I want to remember and it often works well for settling my anxious mind.)

Regardless of what I choose, these things will continue to delight me. I find this comforting.

Thing #1: Birdwatching with my family.

Thing #2: A camelia bud that is beginning to open on the tree outside my house.

Thing #3: The box of chocolates I ate while writing this afternoon. In bed. A heart-shaped box, even. Honestly, can a Tuesday afternoon get much better than that?

It’s mid-February and I’m happy to report I’m midway through the first draft of As-Yet Unnamed Changeling Novel. The year so far has been productive. I’ve been focused. I’ve maintained my presence.

The down side of all this hard work is a sense of imbalance. It’s hard to keep up the writing pace, go to work, take care of my home and family and still remember to give myself a chance to recharge. The first thing to go when I get busy is always my social life. Sometimes it has to happen. There are only so many hours to go around.

But friendships are important, even to those of us with solitary tendencies. After a couple of months of burrowing in my little writer hole I invariably begin feeling lonely and cranky. Which is where I found myself at the end of January.

So this month I’ve been making an effort to reconnect with people who bring joy into my life. It’s amazing how a couple of dinners with good friends can fill my little mouse soul with harmony and fullness.

This might put me a week or two off my ambitious writing schedule. Or maybe not. Maybe a happy mouse is a better burrower.

For a while now I’ve been pushing myself beyond my fears, because I’ve always had a lot of them and I’ve found that every time I face one my life gets a little better. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes:

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

I believe this. Following my fear has always steered me in the right direction. I’m afraid of fewer things. I feel stronger and more confident than I ever imagined was possible twenty years ago.

Lately, my intuition has been urging me to take the “do what scares you” advice quite literally.

I’m thinking about writing a horror novel. This is weird for many reasons, but mainly because I’m a huge wuss. I have a lot of nightmares. I mean a lot. Even thinking about my story idea makes me kind of jumpy.

But you know how it is when an idea takes root. You can’t just shake it off. It grows. So while one side of my brain keeps coming up with reasons not to write a horror novel, the other side is happily watering the little sprout and building a trellis for it to climb. And I find myself telling everyone I know that my next project is a ghost story.

But…but I don’t write scary stories.

But the nightmares.

But dead babies and stuff. What will my mother think?

My fears seem to have no power over this idea. If it weren’t for the fact that I promised myself I’d finish the first draft of my current novel-in-progress by the end of March, I’d be neck deep in research on post-partum depression and a fifty year-old murder case.

Nope, all my worries only make me want to spend more time nurturing my ghost story seedling. So, why not? The worst that could happen is I find out I’m not a horror writer. And I can’t help but wonder if all those nightmares are trying to tell me something, that maybe their cure is in releasing those fears onto the page. Guess I’ll find out.

Yesterday was a sick day for my daughter. THAT sick day. You know, the one where she’s still too sick for preschool but is feeling just well enough to be bored and cranky. I’m sick and grumpy too so together we were pretty much intolerable. By lunchtime I knew we were going to need some kind of intervention or it was going to be a looong afternoon.

I was really tempted to wrap up in blankets, put on a princess movie and zone out. Then I remembered Storyworld. It was a day-saving moment.

Each Storyworld card shows a character, an item or a place. The more you look at the pictures, the more there is to see. They’re all beautiful.

You can play with the cards in infinite ways. Sometimes we pick out cards for each other to tell stories about. Sometimes we search for hidden clues in the cards and try to connect threads between them.

This time, after we’d spread them out on the carpet and examined them all, we collected them in a big pool and fished out three at a time, eyes closed. Three cards became a story.

We spent most of the afternoon storytelling, with a break for toenail painting. Every time I pull out the Storyworld cards I wonder why I don’t do it more often. It’s a great writing exercise for me, making up stories on the spot without worrying about making each one perfect. It’s playful and fun. And for my daughter, it’s magical. I’ve yet to see her grow tired of it. We didn’t stop until it was time to get ready for dinner.

After that, the crankiness returned and didn’t let up until lights out. But those quiet hours in the middle of the day were the reprieve we both needed to make it to bedtime. I hope my daughter dreamt of wishing trees and magic keys.