Meet Michael
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: June 19, 2009
My little broken bird Sarah has an older brother Michael. I see more of Michael because preschoolers get mixed with schoolagers on a regular basis. Same blond hair, same gray eyes, same dysfunctional family.
Today, when I turned my back for 20 seconds, Michael and another boy decided to dump out the Legos, the Kinetics and the wooden blocks. They were probably working their way up to the Lincoln Logs, but I caught them. Now these are large sets. Large, large sets. The tubs they are stored in are 5 gallon containers. The boys are a little too young to really understand how to sort the toys back into their proper places so I enlisted the aid of a couple of the older kids to do that. They’re still a mess, but at least they aren’t on the floor.
Not long after that, the ice cream truck arrived. WooHoo, ice cream! Michael got Spiderman. He got Spiderman all over his shorts. All over his shirt. All over his face. All over the table. I looked at him and said, Michael, you are the king of messes today. He looked up very solemnly and said, “I’m sorry.”
I grabbed his sticky little face in my hands, pressed my forehead to his and said, “You know, the fact that you’re so cute is saving your life today.”
And in the Sarah update, I was talking to another kid tonight after bringing them inside to merge classes. Focused on my conversation, I felt a little hand grab mine. When I glanced down, there was Sarah looking up at my like ‘there you are, I was looking for you.’
Foresight – er Forehearing – Forewarning?
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: June 13, 2009
On my 21st birthday I had an experience with foresight. Actually it was forehearing. I didn’t see anything, but I heard a car accident about 8 hours before it happened.
That summer I was driving a mail truck for my dad. Since the truck only had an AM radio, my brother had given me a set of speakers to attach to my Walkman (yes, this was the stone age) so I could listen to tapes. Naturally, I had the volume up way too loud. I was listening to Riverdogs ‘Toy Soldiers’ as I pulled out of the post office. The road I was pulling out on met up with a highway about 20 feet further along and was headed toward it at about a 30 degree angle, so looking carefully in all directions was paramount, especially since I was driving a 1 ton box van. I looked and there were no cars in sight. As I pulled out, I heard the squeal of tires and the crunch of gravel.
I slammed on the brakes. The truck bucked and died because I forgot to hit the clutch. Peering around for the source of the sound I saw – nothing. No accident. No movement. No cars. Just me, the trees, a farm house down the road, the empty highway. Oh and Riverdogs blaring in my ears and out my windows.
I shut off the tape, set the emergency brake, got out and walked around the truck. No accident no place. Jumped back in the truck and headed on my merry way. (Um, yeah, blaring Riverdogs.)I dropped off the mail at the main post office, flirted with the guys on the dock who were all sure I had to be at least 18 and who were all quite prepared to buy me drinks when they found out I was of age. (It was the shorts, I know it.)
That night, having turned down an full evening of partying with the guys from the post office dock, I set off to meet some friends in my college town and try out my newly minted ID. On my way, in a car with a tape player I was blaring – you guessed it – Riverdogs. Right in the middle of ‘Toy Soldier’ I was headed down a road that had been scraped in preparation for resurfacing so it was nubbly and none too sure. A car in front of me hit its brakes suddenly, so I hit mine.
My car, in a squeal of tires and a crunch of gravel, spun 360 degrees into the ditch. During “my only hope of change keeps falling through,” I went from on my way to a party to sitting in a ditch 6 inches from a mailbox. I shut off the music on “it scatters at my feet just like the rest of my life,” shut off the engine, got out of the car and walked around it. It looked for all the world like I had parked in the ditch. Not a scratch. No one stopped to help me. I’m not sure anyone even noticed anything had happened. Most importantly, I never had to tell my parents.
But I can count. On accident heard. One near miss ridden out. Third time the charm?
I stunned my friends that night by inaugurating my ID with Coke. Plain Coke.
And if I ever meet Vivian Campbell I’m going to tell him he either saved my life that night, or ruined my 21st birthday.
Sarah Smiled!
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: June 8, 2009
This summer, I’m working at a day care with the school age kids. That doesn’t preclude me from coming into contact with the littler kids, it just limits the amount of time I have with them. I don’t force myself on the kids or coach them at all. I let them know I’m there and step in if needed, but otherwise it’s up to them. I work child care the same way I worked retail. You need me, I’ll be right over there.
Sadly, some of these kids have lives that should already be Movie of the Week on the Lifetime Network. One of them is Sarah. I won’t go into her specific issues, but she has a few. She’s the most gorgeous little girl. About 2, blond, gray eyes, she looks like a little doll. No, she really looks like a little doll. For the first 2 weeks I knew her, I never saw an expression on her face unless she was crying. I nicknamed her Sarah Smile as more of a plea than anything else. Not that she didn’t glom onto me immediately. The broken birds are always attracted to me first. I can tell how screwed up a kid’s background is by how fast they become attached to me. Sarah had me with in the first hour. Staring at me solemnly all the while.
Until today.
When I arrived at the day care, the kids were still eating breakfast. Sarah didn’t pay any attention to my presence. We usually accumulate kids in one room for a while, until enough arrive to split them into age groups. I had dashed up to my room for something and was standing at the bottom of the stairs as the 18 mo-3 year group was headed to their room. Sarah, following dutifully in the middle of the group, noticed me standing there, broke out of the group in a beeline for me, grabbed both my hands and beamed up at me.
She smiled! On her own! Without any encouragement for anyone!
Soul Crushing Edits
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: June 7, 2009
About a week ago I got the second round of edits for The Rock Star’s Retreat so I’ve been spending a lot of time banging my head against the desk and cringing. I probably should refer to them as the first round because I have a new editor and she’s got a different focus than the first editor. Maybe that’s why this has been so discouraging. First round is usually the “I’m a big dork and I can’t believe I missed that” round and the second round is more polish. Doing the first round twice makes it more of a “I’m a dork of absolutely unbelievable proportion and I cannot believe I have missed that – how many times now? Oh brother.”
Don’t get me wrong. I know it’s going to be a much better book when Helen is done with me. In fact, I’m going to be a much better writer. Every new editor gives me something else to add to my personal bug list. This time, it’s commas. I have a phobia about commas that developed in college and has never left me. I avoid using them at all costs, including times when they were needed. I think 75% of the track changes I had to accept were commas.
Today I have to launch into the really hard part. Making fundamental changes to the text. My favorite scene needs to be trimmed down because the focus is off the relationship. It’s funny, but it has nothing to do with the story. There’s going to be a writer’s cut of this baby.
Okay, once more into the breech!
Runway RunAway by Lorelei Shellist
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: May 24, 2009
I didn’t get as much done this week as I would have liked because a book arrived in the mail and the whole world had to stop so I could read it.
Now you must understand, the was Lorelei Shellist’s book Runway RunAway. Ms Shellist was engaged to Steve Clark of Def Leppard. As a fan of the band, I vividly remember hearing the news of his death in 1991 and thinking, ‘how the hell does that even happen? Wasn’t anybody paying attention?’ Three out of four of my grandparents were alcoholics and I can literally walk to (the founder of AA) Dr. Bob’s house, so I’m not unfamiliar with the disease, but I have still spent the intervening years wondering. Not continuously you understand, but now and again it would come up. I mean seriously, all the members of Motley Crue are still alive and they were working with much worse odds.
So when I spotted the book months ago (oddly, I went looking for it right about the time it was published) I resisted ordering because it felt ghoulish. Instead I started reading every other rock bio I could get my hands on. I justify this by saying that I’m writing another book about (Rock Star’s Retreat) Jason’s band. I figured out how Bear met Maureen. When I’d pretty much run out of stuff I was interested in I found myself going back to the Runway Runaway site. Again and again and again.
So I ordered the book and every day for a week and a half (even Sundays) I looked west and said some variation of, “where’s my book, Lorelei?” The day it arrived, I pretty much ripped it open and sat down to read feeling ghoulish.
That stopped fast.
There is way more to this book than the chance to rubberneck at an accident. Lorelei Shellist has led a really interesting life. A top model in the 80’s, she traveled the world. If you looked at a fashion magazine during her reign, you probably know her face. Her tales of the road were oddly familiar and rang true to what I’ve experienced overseas. The way she writes is also engaging. She has a real gift for metaphor. The honest and clear way she lays out what could be a diatribe is wonderful. At the back of the book, and you have to look for it, she says that everyone did the best they could at the time. Kinda shocked me because there were parts of the book where I was thinking, OMG, how could he/she/they do that? Can’t he/she/they see what’s going on?
Which brings me to the part of the book that bothered me. As I was reading along I agreed with everything she did. I would have, in her position, done exactly the same thing. Up until the last time Steve called and asked her to come right way and she said no. At that point I was thinking, ‘are you kidding? Go. Go now. He needs you.’
Yep, I’m totally an enabler. I am, in fact, a bigger enabler than her. Sucks when you see yourself in a book.
There were a few writing type things that bothered me too, but honestly they were incidental. The fact that she liked to write out the accent. Here and there is okay, but she did more than I liked. There were also a couple of places where the narrative got murky, but there are places in my own books where the narrative gets murky and I’m not trying to remember something that happened twenty years ago.
Even if you aren’t a fan of Def Leppard, this book is priceless. As a story of addiction and self awareness it is one of the very best. As a record of the late 70’s and the 80’s it is fantastic. It’s a peek into a world that few experienced and fewer remember.
Eye Candy!
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: May 4, 2009
Randolph Mantooth as John Gage on Emergency. How can you resist that crooked grin?
Charlotte ‘Belle’ McClain
Posted by: Charlotte McClain on: October 30, 2008
Charlotte McClain has wanted to be a writer since the second time she finished readingThe Hobbit. She read it twice in two months, so it was rather a snap decision. Since her motto is: What’s that over there?, she experimented a lot. Dabbling in every genre she could find, she has written dozens of short stories, most of a fantasy trilogy, and a growing number of romance novels in any sub-genre that strikes her fancy. If you don’t see something you like, be patient. She’ll probably get there. Heck, in this past year, she’s lived on three different continents so genre hopping is nothin’!
The following pages represent work that is published or about to be. Look around, see what interests you, check back often for the all important “buy” button to appear.
