Jillian Michaels prepares for her biggest workout ever — Motherhood!

Congratulations to Jillian Michaels and partner Heidi Rhoades on the recent additions to their family. When Michaels left the popular NBC weight-loss reality show in 2011, she cited her desire to adopt.
Although the couple’s journey was fraught with delays and disappointments, they were ultimately twice blessed — being paired with a little girl from Haiti and Rhoades giving birth to a son all around the same time.
Bravo!
As the mother of two adopted daughters, I’ve long been a proponent of adoption. I adopted as a single woman because I got tired of waiting for “my husband” to show up and buy us a house with a picket fence out front, an SUV in the driveway and an young secretary in his office eager to play home wrecker.
My first adoption occurred in 2000. A tumultuous year in which I lost my father to lung cancer, moved, switched job titles within my company and bought a new car. And became a parent. When I got the call on my cell phone that I could come to Miami and meet my potential daughter, I hyperventilated and had to pull over to dry heave.
Were they crazy? Were they really going to entrust a little kid to me? I had to question their judgement.
But I went anyway to the Department of Children and Families’ offices in downtown Miami. My knees knocked together the entire elevator ride up to the third floor. The social worker I’d come to know as my “home finder” left the office and returned carrying a little girl in an adorable dress with shy brown eyes.
My heart broke the moment I saw her. Broke because I’d never felt so much love for any thing or anyone and felt immediately inadequate, even unworthy of trying to earn the right to love her so much.
While my desire to become a wildly successful author, touring the world and eating bon bons has always been ever present, my desire to parent has not. I worried motherhood was risky business and could interfere with my life purpose of becoming Jessica Flether in Murder, She Wrote. I needn’t have worried. Motherhood has provided me with endless fodder. Each day there is a moment where something happens or is said where I think, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
As I read news of the Michaels’/Rhoades’ adoption, I am reminded of those early days, months of parenthood. So ladies, here’s a bit of unsolicited advice about becoming adoptive parents and new moms:
1. Brace yourselves. No matter how ideal and wonderful you imagined the adventure, reality will bite you in the hiney. The year I adopted my second daughter, I rang in the New Year at the emergency room. Both girls had high fevers and violent stomach flu. In between sipping champagne and eating tiny biscuits with caviar — NOT! — I was awarded the supreme honor of applying suppositories to both their bottoms because they were too dehydrated to hold anything on their tummies. They can’t teach you that in the parenting classes.
2. Take up deep breathing. When you come across stories in the media that distinguish between a person’s children as their “natural” child and their “adopted” child, try to contain the urge to go all Hulk on their asses. As a former member of the media, seeing that in our paper would send me into a Category Four hurricane spin. People have trouble imagining that a person can connect with an adopted child same as a birth child. Those of us who’ve done it know that the act of adopting is the act of falling in love not only with the child but the role you’ve been blessed to hold — the role of mom.
3. Do not be afraid of hair. OK, Jillian and Heidi. You’ve adopted a black girl with black girl hair. It’s not like yours. And you will look at that beautiful, frothy bit of charcoal fluff and wonder, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” I once read a piece in New York Times Magazine by a white adoptive mom who felt vexed by the social implications of not understanding her daughter’s hair. Here’s a little secret — not all black hair is created equal, and not all black women know what to do with the hair they’re given. My attempts to tame my first daughter’s hair were so inept that the black women at her day care insisted I bring her hair care products to school where they would do it for me. They later gave me a hair tutorial. Do not be afraid to NOT know. I learned to ask for help from professionals. If you two do not have black female friends, make friends with some black stylists. Cute little braids with beads can go a long way to making life easier.

The photo of Jillian holding the two children (photo credit to WA.com/au)  filled me with baby lust. My girls are 14 and 12 now. The oldest was 2 when I first met her. Two years later, her sister was 3 when we first met. A lifetime ago. I cannot imagine my life without them and cannot imagine that their presence in my life would be somehow enhanced had I given birth to them rather than adopted.
Building a family is a cause to rejoice. And no matter how it came to be, family IS family. God bless the Michaels/Rhoades family. May you embrace each and every hairpin turn of the nutty ride called parenthood.

Story of bias too raw for author

Dharuni Ravi received a 30-day jail sentence after a jury found him guilty on 15 charges, including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation.
In September 2010, Tyler Clementi, who had recently come out to his parents, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after learning his freshman roommate at Rutgers, Mr. Ravi, had secretly placed webcams in their room and broadcast Mr. Clementi’s sexual encounter with another man.
The case has drawn a huge amount of attention as bullying is a hot-button topic. Not to mention the issue of gay/lesbian rights.
As a writer, I’m always scanning the headlines for odd stories or news events with strange twists. From the outset, however, the Ravi case filled me with sadness and a bit of hopelessness. Human beings are drawn to stories based on their life experiences. I could not have been an objective juror on this case because so many decades later, my scars from being bullied, ignored, marginalized and ostracized remain. My sin wasn’t homosexuality, it was just not fitting in. Never having “enough” of something — not thin enough, not cool enough, not pretty enough. Bullies always want More.
Except when it comes to responsibility. When it comes to taking full ownership for the carnage caused by their actions, all the best bullies know how to run and hide.
I do not believe Mr. Ravi deserved the maximum 10-year sentence possible for his crimes, but I do believe the relative slap on the wrist of 30 days is an insult.
What was Mr. Ravi thinking? What were his friends thinking?
Can’t you just picture them huddled around their computer monitors, leering through beer-breath fog at the awkward ritual of newfound sexual freedom Mr. Clementi thought he’d discovered?
The New York Times reported that Mr. Ravi alerted friends through a rapid-fire series of Twitter updates so they would know when to pull back the voyeuristic curtain and invade Mr. Clementi’s privacy. So many opportunities to say, “You know what? This is whack. I’m not doing this.” Yet, they pushed ahead, hungry for drunken guffaws and stories to regale the masses at the next tailgate or pledge week.
It’s all fun and games until somebody jumps off a bridge.
Of course, the Ravi family believes they have suffered greatly and their son is still a “good boy.” That remains to be seen.
Despite giving a lengthy tongue lashing from the bench, Judge Glenn Berman of State Superior Court all but set him free.
In my opinion, Mr. Ravi has been given a sweet deal. He should be grateful for the second chance and vow to make himself a better man.
However, based on his steadfast argument that he did nothing wrong and merely made a “mistake,” I do not think Mr. Ravi has learned his lesson. His actions were those of a young predator; a coward cloaked in digital armor seeking to debase and humiliate another human being for sport.
Will you discuss this news item with your children? I will. But I won’t be using it for fiction fodder. Some wounds are still too fresh. And the pain stings deep into the bone. I pray jail is kinder to Mr. Ravi than he was to Mr. Clementi.

VOICE LESSONS, PT. 1

Singing the Praises of Stephanie Plum

Whenever I think about favorite fictional characters or memorable voices in adult fiction, I go straight for Stephanie Plum.
The heroine of New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich’s mega series features a Jersey girl bounty hunter with more gumption than common sense and enough well-rounded secondary characters to populate entire worlds of lesser authors.
I’ve listened to the Plum series, which has reached 18 books and counting, over and over. Sometimes for the sheer pleasure of reliving the wacky world of a single girl, barely making ends meet, in love with two tough guys and who’s as likely to battle a baddie with hair spray as a gun.
Other times, however, I submerge myself in the world of Plum because through her Evanovich teaches a master class in character development. Particularly with the earlier books you really get to appreciate how she constructs an entire world — a tight-knit Jersey neighborhood called “the Burg”; a skeezie bond agency; a mother and father with a monosyllabic relationship built on meat loaf and companionable silence.
Throw in an ex-special forces badass with more sex appeal than undies and a hometown bad boy turned good cop, then top it all off with a smart-mouth hooker turned smart-mouth file clerk and best friend, and you have a absurd cast of characters who keep you entertained and engaged no matter what the story. With Stephanie Plum and company, you just want to hang out with the gang.
As writers, we often get caught up in what our stories are about — I know I do. I’ve always been great at playing the “what if” game. I love thinking up weird, odd, tantalizing, thrilling, terrifying or hilarious scenarios then pushing them forward by asking: “Well, what if this happened? What about this?”
Stephanie Plum and her improbable, even frustrating capers reminds me that no matter how unaccomplished or disturbingly inept this woman is, I’m going to come back for more. Know why?
Because she’s family. Evanovich has created a character who feels so alive, I swear it’s like I know her. Her friends and family, too.

EVANOVICH

The latest Plum novel, now available in paperback, has an absolutely ridiculous plot. However, following Stephanie as she navigates the absurd terrain provides delicious entertainment.

FAT FREE TREATS — Don’t go soft in the middle!

When manuscripts start to sag in the middle and inspiration is in short supply, skip the scones or ho-ho’s and instead opt for a tasty, low-sodium, high-fiber book break. Award-winning journalist and best-selling author, John Sandford, creates thrillers that rev up metabolism without trans-fat or artificial ingredients.

Sandford cooks when it comes to bringing his series’ characters to life. And if a body of work were equivalent to a hot body, then Sandford’s got the six-pack abs of thrill writers.

For many of us newer authors, the middle of our manuscripts sink us. We start out strong, but by the middle, adventure tales, love stories, mystical tales or coming of age stories can sag like an overcooked souffle. Or worse — the bloat like post-Thanksgiving dinner waistlines. If only there was one quick tip:

 

 

• Read authors who keep you tense and alert from cover-to-cover. Sandford is one of my favorites.

A few months ago, I red Sandford’s latest Lucas Davenport suspense novel. I downloaded it the day of its release. Loved it so much I wrote a glowing review that I unfortunately never posted.

Now, struggling with massive writer’s block, I re-read it and decided to stop being lazy. Here’s me hoping to motivate you to motivate me to motivate . . . you get the idea. If you like detective stories or police procedurals, Sandford is a perfect airplane companion; if you’re struggling with any area of your work but particularly your pacing, Sandford’s novels are master classes.

Buried Prey: John Sandford ($27.95, Putnam)

It’s been a long time since I stayed up all night reading a book. Sandford’s 21st entry into his long-loved Prey series had me feeling like a school-girl home on break. Pure magic.

Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis detective whose been solving crimes and throwing punches for two decades returns. This time series’ devotees and newbies alike get a rare look into Davenport’s life before he became Davenport. When the bodies of two young girls are unearthed during a building excavation, Davenport is thrust back in time to his first real homicide.

Fresh out of patrol and eager to please, Davenport re-lives the adrenaline rush, ego boost and heartbreak of his first big case. Now, all these years later, he has a chance to put it right, but the ghosts of the past will take a horrible toll on the present. And the series will never be the same.

Check out how each word feeds into the next. There is little to spare. Crisp, juicy and good to the last bite. Don’t want someone to say that about your next manuscript? Your next book? If so, check out other Sandford gems and exercise your right to be awesome!

RHYME AND PUNISHMENT

Putrid Poetry a lot like 4-day-old fish — it stinks!

5 Tips to scale away the grime of rhyming crimes

It has been two weeks since I met my deadline to turn in a partial manuscript and proposal to my editors at Little, Brown.

Anxiety is setting in.

But I’ve been at this a while, and I know in publishing time, two weeks is like two hours — hardly long enough to push the panic button.

So, instead of sinking into despair or coloring my hair or measuring my derrière, I thought we could talk a bit about one of my favorite pastimes — reading clever picture books. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone. It could damage my street cred!

Now, before you go pointing your finger at the above rhyme, just know that I know it is stinky. You know it’s stinky because it feels forced and unnecessary and just plain silly.

Throughout my journey from wanna-be writer to would-be writer to published children’s author, I’ve encountered enough fellow children-writer wanna-be’s to fill a stadium. I’d estimate that more than 70 percent of that stadium would be filled with people who at one time or another, wanted to write picture books.

If you’ve ever been swept along in the majesty of a picture book, the magic of its clever phrasing, the sweetness of its delivery, you may not have been able to resist the urge to posit:

“Ahh, that was so cute. I want to do that!”

And among picture books, rhyming books tend to capture our imaginations in a way that few literary forms can. The sing-song manner in which we engage our children with the story helps us become part of the story.

Unfortunately, many would-be’s spend far more time worrying about whom they will get to illustrate their great work of art, rather than fighting to carve out the perfect pitch for their prose.

Remember aspiring writer, if you have a unique or clever idea or a tried and true story with a fresh perspective, your No. 1 priority is delivering the best story possible. Worry about the illustrations later.

First, we have work to do. And if you want to write a rhyming picture book, you have lots of work to do.

A reason to rhyme

One of my favorite all-time rhyming books was Jill McElmurry’s Mad About Plaid ($19.44, HarperCollins). When my daughters were very young, it was one of the books they requested two or three times a night.

Why?

Because not only was the phrasing clever, but beneath the cuteness was an exquisite attention to wordplay and an accessible message.

When choosing a subject for your rhyming book, don’t fall victim to cute for cute’s sake. Dig deeper. Visualize your story world and come up with non-rhyming lists of objects, subjects, people who would make sense and further your story.

Use rhyme as a means of connecting the story elements. Never wait for the story to be built around the rhyme.

Little Madison Pratt finds a lonely purse in the park.

It was lined with a sad shade of blue/”Don’t worry,” said Madison,/”I’ll take care of you.”

Madison twirled the little plaid purse in time to the beat of her feet./

She sang a silly song as she skipped along. “Piddly-Diddly-Doo!”

Madison discovers the purse has a curse and she gets infected with plaid. Pretty soon, the whole town in covered in tartan.

The grocery stores and galleries,

the oak trees and the squirrels,

the clouds that rain, the clacking trains,

the ladies and their pearls…

the classrooms and the bathrooms,

the buildings tall and small,

the cars and trucks and taxicabs,

the plaidness touched them all!

Clearly McElMurry approached her tale with an author/illustrator’s eye. She chose her words with an eye toward visually expanding her story world, adding pearls and galleries and classrooms and taxicabs — all of which are accessible to children, believable in Madison’s world, and easy to visualize even without the great illustrations.

Though most who aspire to write great picture books will never illustrate them, we have the ability to “see” our story in our minds. Close your eyes and look at the world in your imagination. Make a list of what you see. It is easy to play with language once you have a subject, rather than having a loose story idea and trying to “make it rhyme” as you go.

“Is that day old poetry I smell?”

Nothing stinks quite like bad poetry. It is criminal. In four states, it is actually a crime. I swear. Well, if it isn’t, it should be. Judges could use it in their courtrooms to subdue unruly miscreants. Forget the pepper spray — bring on the wince-inducing rhymes.

When I worked as a lifestyle columnist for a South Florida newspaper, I spent quite a bit of time writing book reviews. I received many children’s books over the years and I can tell you that nothing got sent to the “circular file” faster than books with rhyming schemes that felt more like gimmicks.

Rhyming books are poems. Delicious, delightful, wondrous to behold poems. Do not be afraid to look up classic and contemporary rhyming poetry, as well as poems that do not rhyme. Study them for the elegant way they bend meaning; the manner in which alliteration within a rhyming set benefits the line.

Language is a flexible medium. Bend it. Shape it. Weld it with fire. Sculpt it with meaning.

The best way to combat stinky poetry is to expose yourself to exceptional poems. Never be afraid of greatness. The world has far too little.

I’d rather be fishing.

OK, not to beat the stinky fish metaphor to death, but remember the old bumper-sticker saying: “A bad day fishing beats a great day at work!”?

It means when you’re doing what you love, and having fun, even a day without a great catch is still a great day.

Picking out the perfect words for your picture book is the same. Don’t rush it. Have a great time. Shoe-la-la! ($16.99, Scholastic), by Karen Beaumont, illustrated by LeUyen Pham, is a delightful, contemporary book about three little divas in search of the perfect pair of shoes.

Party dresses, party hair. . .

Need new party shoes to wear.

Emily, Ashley, Kaitlyn, Claire!

Let’s go find the perfect pair!

Beaumont, no doubt, is a woman all about her shoes. The book follows Emily, Ashley, Kaitlyn and Claire on an adventure in shoe shopping. Beaumont’s rhymes are simple yet satisfying because they offer lyricism without going overboard.

Still, I’d be willing to bet that Beaumont spent a good long time honing her words to make it look so simple. Approach your rhymes like you approach a great shoe sale — you have to try on a lot of shoes to find the perfect fit. But any day shoe shopping — or fishing — or rhyme hunting — is time well spent.

Awesome, party of One!

Never be afraid to try something you haven’t seen before. Marilyn Singer’s Mirror, Mirror ($16.99, Dutton) is a fantastic marriage of something old, something new, something borrowed. . .you get the idea.

Mirror, Mirror is a collection of poems — some rhyme, some don’t. The truly ingenious part of the work is that Singer presents the poems or verse forward and backward.

“The Doubtful Duckling”

Someday

I’ll turn into a swan.

No way

I’ll stay

an ugly duckling,

stubby and gray –

look at me. A beauty I’ll be.

***

A beauty I’ll be?

Look at me –

plain to see,

stubby and gray.

An ugly duckling

I’ll stay.

No way.

I’ll turn into a swan

someday.

Singer flips the order, invigorates the rhymes by presenting them backwards and forward. And it works. Her rhyme phrasing isn’t always exact, but it shows the effectiveness of creating your own pattern.

Cat, hat, mat. . .Willie?

Successful rhyming books can be simple and elegant or filled with clever twists of phrases pulled taut with meaning. You choose.

The first rule of rhyming books is the same as any other books — remember to tell a good story. You are sharing a tale with the reader that is important to you; the subject moves you, makes you laugh, wince, rejoice.

Figure out the story, then dig in and play with the words and phrases. Pull the words apart. Squish them. Eat them. Wallow in their pointy fonts. Enjoy the experience of playing, but remember that rhyming takes work. Anything other than your best effort could result in a poetry massacre. And that just plain stinks!

Counting your own teeth first sign you have a problem

Don’t get trapped in the Crazy Zone:

3 Ways to manage post-deadline trauma!

Waiting for a response from an editor can lead to a creativity shutdown. Before you suffer a full-blown creative power outage, consider ways to use the wait time for good, not evil.

Writers. We’re creative. And that’s a good thing. Until it’s not.

See, when it’s good, we infuse make-believe people with nuances, fill their bellies with desires and their mouths with lustrous quotes.

However, such a skill has a dark side.

The ability to create believable inner-lives for our characters means we can also do it for ourselves. Such as my proclivity to imagine all sorts of horrible fates for my future as a writer.

Which means managing the time between manuscript sendoff and The Call can mean the difference between sanity and sitting in the back of a closet counting your teeth. (My definition of coo-coo!)

The Call, by the way, is when an editor, after having your manuscript a week, a month, six months, a decade, calls you back and says “yea” or “hell no!”

Managing your time while waiting for word on a pending manuscript is crucial — for your creativity and your well-being. Each new novel I have came as a result of an idea I developed while waiting for word on its predecessor.

A lesson learned after my first manuscript, which was sold but ultimately never published. An editor greener than my unpublished self was instrumental in helping me “fix” it into oblivion.

While I waited for her to get back to me, I continued to “tinker” with it. Editing, revising, going off on whole other tangents. Invariably, by the time she got back to me, the manuscript I had never matched the one she had.

To have your novel bought, then squashed despite numerous attempts to “make it right” is a soul-crushing experience.

It took a long time to venture back into publishing waters after that fiasco. I licked my wounds and continued to nurture the bubbling brew of make-believe simmering in my head.

Then I got a unique opportunity. I was a working journalist who won a University of Michigan Journalism Fellowship.

The award allowed me to spend a year at the U studying whatever I wanted while still receiving a salary and a promise of returning to my job. A truly life-altering opportunity.

It was in a creative writing workshop that I developed a short story called, “Acting.” Although it was later rejected as part of a collection of young adult fiction, the editors encouraged me to develop the story into a novel.

And that’s what I did.

Acting was a YA about sex and teenagers. Eve Alexandra and Eve Belinda are twins. But when the “brainy” twin winds up pregnant, the mother has a hard time expressing her disappointment, so she instead takes out her frustrations on the other twin. The story is told from the perspective of the non-pregnant sister.

The heart of the story is the intensity of Eve Belinda’s relationship with her mother. I dove  into some of the dark crevices of my psyche to pull up the raw, bitter disputes and misunderstandings that often defined my teenage relationship with my own mom.

Writing Acting was emotionally exhausting. Still, the writing wasn’t half as bad as the idea of sending it off into the unknown.

After the fiasco with my first manuscript, I was set to agonize for weeks and weeks about the future of Acting, not mention my own future.

Left to my imagination, my fragile brain conjured up images of New York editors sitting around some Manhattan, Sex In The City type lounge, sipping frou-frou cocktails and discussing the sheer and utter waste of time that is my work.

“Oh, dahling, if you think your writer is dreadful and boring you should be forced to read the rubbish of our most unnecessary author, Sherri Winston. Pitiful!”

Unlike my previous slide into mania, this time I decided to do something different. Rather than sitting around thinking up the millions of reasons someone might reject the manuscript — or worse — coming up with ways to improve the darned thing before anyone even said it needed it, I developed an imaginary friend.

Her name was Kayla. She was a spunky teen, shy but with a wry sense of humor and an inner fierceness. Kayla was the me I’d have wanted to be in high school. I would bounce ideas off Kayla while I was driving. Instead of worrying about what was going on with the two Eves, I laughed at Kayla’s antics.

By the time I sold my first manuscript, I had come up with a solid idea for my next project. The Kayla Chronicles became my second book.

Now I’ve proposed a sequence of books and I’m so eager to hear back that the mania is coming back. Even though the manuscript has barely been with my editor at Little, Brown for a week, I can’t help opening the document and diddling with it.

Then I have to talk myself down to prevent fixing the manuscript to death.

So I’m going to do what has helped me weather the wait in the past. What should you do to keep yourself motivated while waiting to hear the fate of a pending project? Here are a few coping strategies I’ve learned.

Because really, if you get crazy enough to count your own teeth — and when I picture this, by the way, the tooth counter argues with herself over the number of teeth she has — if it gets this bad, getting published is now your second biggest concern. I’m just saying.

Make (Up) A New Friend

When I came up with the Kayla character, I was aiming to create a girl as different from the Eves as possible. When we write fiction, we sometimes fall into the pattern of becoming comfortable with one type of main character.

Just like high school, when we gravitate toward cliques, creating characters and their milieu can mean sticking with the familiar.

Instead, allow your brain to take a mini-vacation from what you already know. Picture a place or a type of person quite opposite what you would normally write about. Instead of creating a character you wish to feature in a book, just think of it as someone you’d like to hang out with.

The exercise will not only occupy your mind and keep you from fixating on how long your manuscript has been gone, but it’ll also allow you to stretch your literary muscle.

Ahoy! Books ahead

When I’m writing, I try to read other authors with characters whose voices resemble my character’s. It helps keep me grounded in her world. However, while waiting for feedback, it’s fun to see how the other half lives.

Lemonade War ($5.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Jacqueline Davies, wasn’t exactly the type of story I was drawn to. But it was getting good buzz had had a smart premise: A brother and sister decide to spend their last few days of summer vacation battling to see who can sell the most lemonade.

I liked the idea of the kids using their unique gifts; I also liked the entrepreneurial spirit. I had walked around for months with a feisty character in my head, but couldn’t figure out what to do with her.

Reading Davies award-winning novel for middle-graders helped me place my character, Brianna Justice, in a political thriller — grade-school style. And I topped the whole thing off with frosting! Brianna went on to star in my latest novel, President of the Whole Fifth Grade, as a young girl driven by her desire to be a famous “cupcake maker,” author and millionaire!

It was so much fun hanging out with Brianna and trying to figure out how she’d react to different situations that I didn’t have time to bog myself down with doubt while waiting for Kayla.

Relax

Burnout is never pretty. Droopy eyelids. Lethargy. The uncontrollable urge to walk down the aisle of book stores surreptitiously knocking off all titles by the prolific and astounding body of work that is Meg Cabot. Not pretty.

Nothing kills creativity faster than misplaced bitterness toward other authors. That sort of thing is a byproduct of trying too hard. (You are not a bad person; you just, occasionally, write like a bad person and you have bad person thoughts. Not your fault, really.)

Remember to take a break and go out and play. Walk away from the computer; turn your back on the works of others. Take some deep breaths, and don’t be afraid to exhale.

Waiting for word on your manuscript can be gut-wrenching if you let it. So don’t let it. Avoid the trap of constantly fixing your work and instead look ahead. And never get too busy to allow yourself some good old-fashioned fun. Go out and play. I guarantee, it’ll chase the crazy away.