Tag Archive for: Physical Education

Why the Dog Will Never Die in My Books

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When we were young, we had a host of animals, mostly cats and dogs, but with a couple of Guinea pigs and hermit crabs thrown in for good measure.  One of our best, and most ill-behaved, pets was a sixty-pound Golden Retriever named Dusty who had a habit of escaping at the first sound of the open screen door, usually taking my frail grandmother down with him as he bounded outside, happy to be running free and in the fresh air.  I can speak favorably and lovingly of him now because he’s been dead for thirty-five years but back when he was living with us, well, he was a royal pain in the tuchus.
My parents both worked in those days so my grandmother was charged with getting us off to school with our frozen bologna sandwiches and Devil Dogs, a dime each for the carton of warm milk we would buy when lunchtime rolled around.  My grandmother didn’t drive, so getting us on the bus was imperative because once the bus left, if one of us hadn’t made it on, we would have to walk close to two miles to get to school.  Now that doesn’t sound like a long distance now, but back then, our legs were shorter and the miles seemed interminable.  Suffice it to say that we would ran, en masse, when we heard the squeal of the breaks, someone older pushing someone younger ahead so that we didn’t have to hoof it.  We always made it.
Except for one day.
Dusty had a travelin’ jones that beautiful fall morning and was just waiting for the chance to get out and run pell-mell throughout the neighborhood.  I went out after him, chasing him all the way down our street toward the reservoir, begging him to come back home.  I knew I had all of five or six minutes to make this happen, but as luck would have it, he was out without his leash or even his collar so I had to pin him to the ground and basically drag him up the street, his sixty pounds feeling like a thousand as we inched our way up the street toward home and the bus stop.  We were about halfway up when I heard the familiar siren song of the bus coming down the street and saw my siblings running toward its open doors.  That’s when I began to cry.
Through some sheer force of will, I did manage to get the dog the two hundred and fifty feet back to the house, where I threw him inside and cried to my grandmother that not only would I have to walk to school, I would now be late and probably have to serve detention, meaning that I would have to walk home, too.  She cried right along with me, apologizing for never having gotten her license and trying to figure out what we could do to get me to school in time for the bell.  Desperate, I ran outside and spied my neighbor, Bobby, getting into his brand-new Mustang convertible, the one with the white leather seats, the one that he didn’t let any of us near.  He was on his way to his job as a first-year teacher at a local high school and while I won’t go so far as to say that he was unhappy to see me, let’s just say that, well, seeing me crying in my uniform with my book bag wasn’t the way he wanted to start his day.  I begged him for a ride, explaining the tale of dragging Dusty up the street and missing the bus, the same one that two of his younger brothers rode with me to St. Catherine’s.  He finally relented after my grandmother intervened, making me sit at the edge of the passenger-side seat, lest my plaid uniform leave some kind of deleterious stain on the white leather upholstery.
I spent the day smoldering with rage at the dog, who was a colossal pain in the butt about 90% of the time.  In addition to escaping, he ate our socks, our sweaters, our shoes; he stole things from kids disembarking the school bus; he barked at things we couldn’t see; and he needed to be loved and petted constantly even in the middle of dinner.  But when I got home, and he ran to me, slobbering and jumping and just so excited to see me, I could do nothing but hug him and kiss him because when all was said and done, he was just a dog.  And a beautiful, fun, loving one at that who adored me in spades and who had a bad habit of escaping when he should have been napping next to my grandmother.
Dusty died at the age of two, after a brief, but horrible, illness, right around the time that he stopped escaping and started becoming the dog we always wanted.  I will never forget my mother, painting the trim in our bathroom, crying and telling me that she didn’t think we could ever get another dog because she just got too attached and it was too painful when they died.  She cried for several days and while I couldn’t really understand it then—the kids and I moved on with extreme alacrity—I do now.
Intellectually, when we get a pet, we know that they are only ours for a short time in the grand scheme of things but the comfort and pleasure we get while they are here on earth with us is so powerful and all-encompassing that we can’t resist the pull to ownership.  With my dog advancing in age, I’m already thinking about getting another dog so that when she goes—and it will happen—I’ll have someone else to comfort me in her absence.  She is a part of our family and plays just as important a role as the humans who make up our little band of Barbieris.
I was thinking about our pets—both past and present—this weekend after I got a call from a good friend telling me that her beloved dog, a miniature Schnauzer named Stella, had died suddenly and unexpectedly.  The shock of hearing that, coupled with the knowledge of how much I love our little Westie and our big, giant cat, made me so sad that I burst into the tears, my friend and I crying over the loss of this twenty-pound animal who loved to bark at squirrels, who played with my dog in the summer while the kids swam in the pool, and who loved to bury her bone in the couch cushions to protect it for later consumption. So while this blog may seem like just a bunch of ramblings about a disobedient Golden Retriever named Dusty, it is a tribute to all of our beloved pets, the ones who grace our lives for a short time but who bring us so much joy and happiness while they are here.
To Stella—I hope you are enjoying a big, giant JumBone in heaven.
Stiletto faithful, tell us about your favorite memory of a beloved pet.
Maggie Barbieri

Lowering Your Expectations

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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I have had the pleasure of hosting the past several dinners here at Chez Barbieri.  This year, we will play host to hubby’s family—twelve of us in all—and perhaps a friend and her family for dessert.  My turkey is known in the family for its moistness and fabulous flavor, success attributed to the brining process that takes several days.  My mashed potatoes are laden with butter, garlic, and sea salt, and although not the same recipe as the one that comes from Jim’s family, a crowd pleaser nonetheless.  I apparently also make great green beans, and for Jim’s brother-in-law and me, I make roasted brussel sprouts, a dish no one else would touch with a ten-foot pole but which he and I love.

I guess I’m what you would call a pretty serious home cook.  It is the rare dish that requires me to follow a recipe and I’ve become more adept over the years with complicated vegetarian dishes in order for child #1, an avowed non-meat eater, to get the nutrients she needs.  Baking is not really my forte, but only because I don’t like to measure and child #1 works at a bakery.  Problem solved.  There is one thing, however, that I’ve never mastered and that is gravy.  Can’t do it.  Have tried and failed repeatedly. And there’s nothing worse at a Thanksgiving meal than putting out an entire meal and then standing over the stove attempting to get the proper amount of roux to make a thick, but not gelatinous, gravy.  There’s something about the preparation of gravy that makes me anxious, and I think that’s because gravy is a staple of many meals, Thanksgiving being the most important.  My entire culinary reputation is riding on it and that’s just not a chance I’m willing to take.

I tried for years to make the right gravy, standing beside my mother and mother-in-law, watching what they did and trying to replicate it.  It just doesn’t work.  So, for the past few years—and with full disclosure to my holiday guests—I buy gravy at the local gourmet store where it is made fresh from the turkeys that they roast and which I serve it in my china gravy boat.  It’s delicious and the right consistency every time and all I’m required to do is heat it up.  Voila!  Perfect gravy.
Maybe it’s age, or maybe it’s just that my usual perfectionism just doesn’t translate to pan drippings, but I’ve decided that I’m going to make things easier on myself in order to enjoy the holiday. I’ve also decided the same will be true for writing because no matter how many times I decide I’m going to write the perfect first draft, trying to follow some self-created recipe for writing, it doesn’t happen.  (I bet you didn’t think I could connect gravy and writing but YOU’D BE WRONG!) You’d think after six books, I’d be smarter and know that the perfect first draft is an urban legend, kind of like the multi-city author tour or the alligator that lives in the New York City sewer system.  Or that everyone can cook gravy.

Starting a book without a roux—which is basically an outline or some kind of detailed plot diagram—is pretty scary but it is something I do every time I write a book.  (I’ve only written one outline in the past decade and it’s for a book I’ve yet to write.  We’ll see how that goes.)  It usually works out ok, though, with me figuring out halfway in whodunit and why.  The problem I have is that I hate every word I’ve written before I sit down to write again and I want to revise everything, every day, before I start again, kind of like how I always mess with the home-cooked gravy until it is the aforementioned gelatinous mess.  I can’t leave well enough alone.  This kind of self-critique, I’ve found, is detrimental to the process and just slows things down.  So with this latest book—the seventh in the Murder 101 series—I’ve just taken off the breaks, or to continue with the metaphor, bought the store-bought gravy, and am just dumping everything from my head into the gravy boat and figuring out how to make it work later. (I know…the metaphor is getting a little thing, but stick with me.)
So far, so good.  I have about 40,000 words to write to finish this book—piece of cake!  But lowering my expectations about what constitutes perfection has been a great lesson for me.  Interesting that after writing for all these many years, I’m still learning new things with every book.  I don’t have to make perfect gravy and I don’t have to write perfect first drafts.  That’s what the delete key is for.  What about you?  Anything to share on the topic of the perfect first draft?  Gravy?  Thanksgiving?  Let it fly!

Oh, and in honor of the release of PHYSICAL EDUCATION next Tuesday, one lucky commenter will be chosen at random (my cat will do the picking) to win a signed copy. 

Maggie Barbieri

From the Mind of a Guilt-Ridden Perfectionist

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by Maggie Barbieri

Hello, it’s me again. You get me two days in a row. Why? Because a guest blogger is a no-show, undoubtedly felled by an over-packed schedule and a failure to keep everything he or she had planned to do in a neat little row in his or her mind. I can totally understand. Remember, I’m the girl who still uses a paper planner and writes down EVERY SINGLE TASK that needs to be tackled in a given day. Some days, I cross everything off the list. Others, I may cross one thing off and leave a trail of broken, self-imposed promises on the page, my neat little handwritten notes a sad reminder of what I didn’t accomplish.

But back to memory. I pride myself on having a good one, although sometimes, I’m human, just like everyone else. (My husband and kids will guffaw mightily if they read this. They know for a fact that I’m human.) Curiously, I can go to the grocery store three times a week and always fail to come home with two products that we use in great quantity here: toilet paper and peanut butter. Despite my best efforts, I usually get everything else I’ve gone into the store for, and forget these two crucial items. The result? I end up buying them at the local mom and pop and spending at least triple what they would cost at the store. It’s like I have a mental block against toilet paper and peanut butter, two items that have never done me wrong. My lack of attention to purchasing them is confounding.

Writing a mystery series—and I’m knee deep in book 7 as I write this post—requires a good memory as well as some handwritten notes. For me, I have a host of characters who live in my head—Alison, Crawford, Max, and Fred, predominantly—but others who make an appearance very now and again and require my attention so that they can tell me their back story and let me know how they would react to a given situation. For instance, I have a kid right now in the new book, the name of whom Alison can’t remember. His name? Alex. Why? Because that’s what his great-grandfather’s name was, the great-grandfather who came to this country from Russia with just the clothes on his back and currency that converted to three dollars. Is this germane to the story? No. But Alex told me his backstory and I need to be attentive to that. Now, if Alex happens to reappear in a future book, I’d like to say that I will remember this backstory verbatim, but there is a slim chance that great-grandfather will have come to this country from Poland with the clothes on his back and currency that converted to ten dollars. Why? Because my brain is crammed. With ideas, with characters, with plots, with the reminder that I need to buy peanut butter and toilet paper the next time I go to Shoprite.

Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s simple: sometimes I get messages from people who have spotted an inconsistency in one of my books. In an earlier book, someone may have had black hair, and in a subsequent book, it’s a shade lighter. All I can say is that I do my darnedest, really I do, to make sure that these types of inconsistencies don’t happen. Fellow blogger Susan McBride told me that a famous author—who shall remain nameless—once wrote an essay about this very issue. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, that he does his best, but his goal is to tell a good story. So what that character A had a brother in book 1 and then three sisters and no brother in Book 6? It doesn’t matter to famous author. He wants you to enjoy his books for their story, not specifically for the continuity.

I’m not there yet, in terms of attitude. I’m still trying really hard to make everything as consistent as it can be in every book I write, but I, like other authors, make mistakes, and sometimes, forget things. (See: peanut butter and toilet paper.) I’m a perfectionist, really I am (insert husband and kids guffawing) so it pains me to think that I’ve missed something. All this to say that we’re all doing our best to make sure every t is crossed and every i is dotted and that everyone has the same number of siblings and the same color hair every time we publish a new book.

And if you see me around town, do me a favor? Remind me to buy toilet paper and peanut butter, please?
_______________

***Breaking News!!! Physical Education is available for pre-order at Amazon now!!!

The Book Is Done!

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This is going to be a very short post today because at 3:43 pm yesterday, after working day and night for weeks, I finally finished Physical Education, the sixth installment in the Murder 101/Alison Bergeron series.

I think my fingers are bleeding.

Yes, I have a year to write each book.

And yes, I have a full-time job.

So, that makes for some very long nights at the end of the year, when most people just want to take some time to smell the flowers, or the needles from their Christmas tree. I was only five days late turning it in, but Kelley, my most wonderful editor, assured me that she wouldn’t be staying up on New Year’s Eve to read this latest–and presumably brilliant!–tome. (I jest, of course.)

Today, I will resume aforementioned full-time job and think about book 7.

Until next week, let me now wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2011, a year in which all of your wishes do come true.

Maggie Barbieri