Andrew Roe

My wife and I (mostly my wife) are in the process of potty training our twins.

So we’re knee-deep in the classics of potty training lit: Once Upon a Potty, Big Boys Use the Potty, Potty Time, etc.

And we’re also experiencing scenes like this, which happened this morning:

“Who wants to see me pee?” announces Ethan, our four year old.

Celia and Henry follow Ethan into the bathroom. They watch him pee. They are transfixed.

After Ethan finishes, Celia points at Ethan’s penis and laughs.

“That’s Ethan’s penis,” my wife explains.

“You guys have one too,” says Ethan.

“Not Celia,” says my wife. “Not me. We don’t have a penis.”

“Yes you do,” he insists.

“We’re girls,” she continues. “We don’t have penises.”

“Celia had a penis when she was a baby.”

“What about Mommy?” I ask. “Did she have a penis when she was a baby?”

“Yes. And when Celia gets big and is a big girl like Mommy she’ll have what Mommy has.”

“Kramer vs. Kramer” is now up at Titular, which publishes stories named after the titles of books, films and TV shows.

I don’t usually write stories with movie titles.

I also don’t usually write stories about extreme fighters.

Here’s the first paragraph:

“Kramer wraps himself around Kramer’s legs, from behind, then lifts him and tips him up and over and down, per their rehearsed routine. There sounds a thud of permanence as both men (bearded, burly) hit the mat. The crowd wakes up, a little—a light sprinkling of “ooohs” and “aaahs” among the less-than-half-filled room. Kramer thinks he smells Mennen Speed Stick tonight. Kramer usually uses Old Spice. What’s up with that? The sweat. Every night Kramer marvels: the sweat.”

I really like this quote from Jen Michalski:

“I like to think we have a lot of writing teeth. Some are slow and painful or impacted, and you pay a lot of attention to those. But then you wake up the next morning and you’ve cut a completely different tooth that you didn’t know you had. And the trick is to let all the teeth fall out on their own. If you try and pull them, the gums retain the memory of that loss. And maybe it affects the next tooth growing out of that hole. I’d like to think I’ll always have teeth coming in, but who knows? I have teeth now, and that’s all I’m going to worry about.“

You can read the rest of her Fictionaut Five interview with Meg Pokrass here.

This essay, by Dani Shapiro, hurts a little.

She quotes an essay called “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years” by Ted Solotaroff, editor and founder of the New American Review.

In his essay, Solotaroff wonders what happened to all the young and talented writers he came across when editing his magazine.

Most of these writers, he reports, had given up. A few kept writing and publishing. But most seemed to disappear (writing-wise, that is).

Solotaroff writes:

“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself. Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

Shapiro’s essay is worth checking out. She talks about that “miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment.” She talks about how things have changed since she started her writing career.

And she talks about how she sees young writers who are after the big deal, the big score, the big book that gets the big advance.

Shapiro writes:

“The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.”

Writers must work hard. Writers must be prepared to be disappointed and neurotic and full of tunneling doubt. Writers must also be patient. Above all else, yes, they must endure. It’s hard to think long term, I know, especially these days.

“We need to be thinking about your long-term career.”

That’s what the agent I’m currently working with told me in our first phone conversation. That meant a lot. It still does.

I’m taking one — from writing, from stressing about not writing, from sending stories out, from keeping up with blogs, Facebook, etc.

I’ve just been feeling the need to focus on other areas of my life right now. So I’m going to be doing that.

It’ll only be a month. Or two. And I’ll still post here occasionally, but it will probably be more sporadic than usual.

I’m hoping to come back refreshed and ready to jump back into the novel I’m working on. There’s a lot to do.