From a movie-viewing standpoint. I HATE this time of the year.

The big summer movie season is over, the fall awardsy season has not yet begun, and what’s left is the rejects - the movies that were so lousy, not even their studios believed in them enough to give out a decent release date. Takers, The Last Exorcism, Going the Distance, even The American - who cares? (Sidebar: My husband is excited about Machete, the Grindhouse movie that was sort of spun off of…you know, Grindhouse. But I maintain that Danny Trejo, though likeable, can’t act his way out of a paper bag.)

Grump, grump, grump, says me. I have found some consolation here at home, thanks to the last few episodes of “True Blood” and “Entourage” (yes, I still watch and enjoy; no, I’m not sure why) and also my renewed subscription to Netflix. Yay, Netflix. The whole enterprise has changed quite a bit in the two or three years since I last dropped off. Now you can watch all kinds of things immediately, online. Upside. But before you think I’m an evil Netflix plant, downside: most of the stuff that’s available instantly is kinda crap. It’s like Netflix blew most of their funds on a few really blockbuster movies - Star Trek, Iron Man, The Proposal - and then used the remaining spare change to buy the rights to quality merchandise like “Behind Enemy Lines 3″ and “Tornado Valley.”

One thing I HAVE fallen love with, however, is Felicia Day. Wait, back up. I meant “The Guild.” If you’ve never been a participant in the Joss Whedon awesomeverse, Felicia Day is an adorable actress from Buffy (season 7), Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and also Dollhouse. This girl is all charming facial expressions and overpowering likability. She’s also become sort of a princess of the geeks, thanks in part to Whedon and in part to my latest obsession: The Guild.

The Guild is a web series (I know, how trendy am I) about a group of gamers who play in a World of Warcraft-type online game. They’re all the kind of people who are great in the game and completely clueless in the real world. Felicia Day isn’t just the lead actress, she’s also the co-creater, and I’m pretty sure she’s responsible for the quirky, shy, good-natured humor of the show. Which makes me love it. And which also made her shoot to the top of my Fantasy Best Friend list. If you at all enjoy this whole “geek chic” movement, I highly encourage you to check out this show. Seasons 1-3 are available via Netflix, or season 4 is on the website now. It may be a web series, but it sure does pass the time until real TV comes back.

I’ve watched “True Blood” from the beginning. I was a fan of the books for years, so for season one, I talked my husband into letting us get HBO just for the duration of the new episodes. When season 2 was on we couldn’t afford it, so I persuaded a friend to let me come over when she was at work and watch the first half of the season on her DVR. I watched the second half while visiting family in New Orleans for the Words and Music Festival. Twenty-six years old, away from husband and baby, in one of the country’s most exciting cities, and I happily sat around catching up on TV. True story.

Anyway, this year we’ve got HBO again, and, especially because it’s summer, “True Blood” is the show I most look forward to each week. I’m actually sad as I watch it, because I know that in just a few weeks it’ll be over for the season, and I’ll have to wait a whole year for new episodes. (Stupid pay cable.) I can tell you that I love “The West Wing” because of Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant writing, or “Chuck” because of the actor who brings such humor and likability to the title role, but I honestly can’t put a finger on exactly why I love True Blood. There’s no one specific reason; it’s just hopelessly entertaining.

Anyway, with the season finale coming up and “True Blood” on the brain, I’ve been re-reading some of the early books, and as I’ve kept going, something has been tugging at my mind, some detail I should be noticing. Today I figured out what it was: this is the first time I’ve read these early books since “Twilight.”

As someone who writes in this genre, I can tell you that the “Twilight” books have become the ultimate elephant in the room. They’re like if the elephant in the room was covered in a sea of blood and being hunted by a jillion teenage girls. For me, trying to write in this genre now means constantly asking myself, “Is this plotline/character/joke/fight scene/backstory too much like something that happened in the Twilight saga?” And if so, engage delete button. I now have a big list of Twilight details taking up valuable real estate in my brain. You know when you’re at the grocery story, and you look in the cart to make sure you have everything on your list? Well, I have to check the cart to make sure NOTHING I have is on the list. It’s incredibly annoying, because this is a genre with a lot of overlap. Everyone has vampires, and werewolves, and until Twilight came around, that was perfectly fine. Everybody did their own thing. Now I can’t get rid of the damned (metaphorical) elephant.

And I’m not the only one. This is still the genre I most love to read, and unfortunately a lot of the more recent urban fantasy novels come with baggage. There’s this sense of I’m trying really hard to make this different from Twlight or Look see this is completely different from Twlight. Maybe this is just paranoia talking, but sometimes I’ll come across some ridiculous detail and suspect that the author only put it in to avoid Twilight comparisons. Their vampires are always bald, or are contagious to howler monkeys or something. Even with the more subdued writers, you can often feel the author tiptoeing around, trying not to call your attention to any similarities. (Which is kind of ridiculous because similarities will be inevitable, if someone is really working to find them. Does your book have vampires? Yup. Will some “Twilight"-obsessed fan probably find a parallel somewhere? Yup again.)

But, I digress. My point is that Sookie Stackhouse was reading minds and being immune to vamp powers a good four years before Edward and Bella made it cool. And because of that, Charlaine Harris’s early books (we won’t talk about the downhill slide of the last two or three) have a relaxed, folksy sense of fun that is missing from any of the post-Twilight urban fantasies I’ve read. It makes me long to be a writer ten years ago, instead of now. Will I ever be able to write in this genre with that kind of freedom? Will I always be tiptoeing around the damned elephant?

Maybe. But at least Harris gives me something to aspire to.

When I began writing “Dead Spots,” back in November, I was in a hurry. Writing for NaNoWriMo will do that to you. Little did I know, however, that I would still be paying for my hastiness nearly a year later.

Let me back up. I set my first book in Chicago, because I figured it should be in a big city, and Chicago was close enough to do research, if I really needed to. But to be honest, I still feel like the book is lacking a real sense of the city. I looked at some maps and made up a few fictional streets, and basically…I fudged it. And I never really felt satisfied with that. So when I was choosing a location for “Dead Spots,” my second book, I still needed a big city (the term “urban fantasy” kind of requires it), but I wanted to use a city that I was familiar with, which really only gave me one option: LA. Which was all well and good, but I got cocky: I figured my memory of the city would be good enough, and I ran with it. For the most part, it worked out okay - I lived in a bunch of different parts of the city, and I drove around a lot, and I remember how it felt, being there. But I made one mistake, and this weekend it came back to bite me in the ass.

See, I have now started work on the sequel, and this time I’m not rushed; I’m really trying to do it right. I decided not to rely on my memory. I went to Borders and bought an LA street map, and I went to Target and bought multicolored pushpins. The plan was to put the map up in our home office and pushpin the major locations, so I could keep track for my various descriptions. Blue for important locations that would be in every book, and then different colors to represent locations from other books.

That might seem like a lot of work, but you wouldn’t believe how much something like this comes up, especially when writing about LA. It’s a driving city, so the characters have to drive quite a bit. I have to think about the routes they would take, the theoretical traffic, the amount of time it would take to get from point A to point B under these circumstances. And that’s just the logistics. There’s also description: where is the ocean in relation to the characters? The mountains? Downtown? Is Scarlett, the main character, feeling a breeze from the sea, or breathing extra smog from all the traffic, or baking because it’s hotter in the friggin’ Valley than anywhere else? This crap is complicated.

Anyway. Getting the map and making this plan was all well and good, but this book is a sequel, which means that many of the locations have carried over from the first book. Before I could even start mapping out “Trail of Dead,” I had to go back through “Dead Spots” and map everything from there. And that’s when I discovered my mistake. “Dead Spots” opens with a terrible murder, a massacre at a public park. In November, when I started writing, I randomly picked a real-life park that had the vegetation I needed - Los Cerritos Park. Since this murder is the plot point that drives the entire rest of the book, the park gets mentioned all the time. On my mental LA map, Los Cerritos was in the southwest part of the county, so the LAPD homicide detective who’s investigating the case is based out of the LAPD southwest office.

Here’s the mistake: the park isn’t in southwest LA, it’s in southeast LA. Which, in fact, puts it out of Los Angeles proper. Los Cerritos is in it’s own little town, and that town isn’t under LAPD jurisdiction. In fact, there’s technically no police department. There’s a sheriff’s department.

Crap.

Basically, I had three choices: ignore the mistake, rewrite the book so my detective is from the Los Cerritos Sheriff’s Department, or edit the whole damn book to change the park name. I never really considered ignoring it, because what’s the point in writing about a city you’re familiar with if you’re going to make mistakes like that? I hate the idea of people in LA someday reading the book going, “Ha! This lady doesn’t know what she’s talking about!” I earned my stripes in LA navigation, dammit. I spent four and a half years figuring out that city, and it was hard, and I accidentally wound up in places that were occasionally terrifying, and I survived. Option two was also out of the question, because placing my detective in the Los Cerritos Sheriff’s Dept would drastically reduce his territory, therefore crippling any future novels, So…crap.

This tale of woe has a happy ending. I spent my entire Saturday night on the floor of the living room with my map, figuring out where I could place a fictional park. Then I did some hard-and-fast “Find and Replace” work and (hopefully) fixed up the text. Now I’m satisfied that the geography of “Dead Spots” is dead-on (sorry, couldn’t resist). And maybe using a fictional park is better, anyway, because it is the site of a bunch of murders and all.

But the moral of the story, kids, is don’t rush the research. And just to show that I learned my lesson, my office now features a very neat map of LA, complete with colored pushpins.

In the last month or two, since I sent the “final” draft of my novel to my agent, something strange has come to my attention.

I had developed good work habits.

My first book took about 16 months to write. Granted, I did get married and have a baby within that time, but there were also entire months when I didn’t so much as open the document on my computer. I kept losing my momentum, and then I would write furiously for a couple of days, and then lose it again. And a lot of this was while I was on bed rest, people. You know you’re having motivational issues when you don’t write while you literally have nothing else to do.

But with my second book, I cut that time down to about 5 months. Granted, I didn’t get married or have a baby, and it’s always easier to do something the second time, but still. I experimented with excellent work habits during NaNoWriMo (when I literally used every possible free moment to write, at least for the first two weeks), and then I just sort of found a good rhythm. I didn’t write every day, and I probably missed an entire week or two at different points (hello, Christmas), but I kept at it. Kept going. Now that I’m not writing anymore, I figured out how I had managed to do that: guilt. If Mattie was napping and I wasn’t writing (or cleaning the house), I felt guilty. If Tyler went to bed before I was ready to sleep and I didn’t write, I felt guilty. Every time I had a spare hour that I didn’t write? Huge self-administered guilt trip.

Which leaves me in a weird place now, when I don’t have anything in particular I need to be writing. Oh, there’s the sequel to “Dead Spots,” and I’ve started a short story about one of the minor characters, just for fun. But I don’t feel driven to write, because even if I finished the sequel tomorrow, there’s nothing more I could do with it that what I’m already doing, which is waiting for my agent to make things happen. There’s no sense of urgency - in fact, I realize that in just a few weeks when I start school, I’m not going to have any time to work on this anyway.

And yet…the guilt is still there. It’s weird, right? It’s like when you train yourself to be really neat because your roommate is neat, and then they move out. Nobody really cares if you’re a slob; you live by yourself. But the impulse is still there. Dare I say this is an impulse vs. inherent quality kind of situation? Nature vs. nurture? Whoa. I just freaked myself out.

Anyway, here’s my feeling on this situation. Kudos to me for finally, after years of rotten work habits, teaching myself to make the time count. And, simultaneously, what a shame it is that my work habits are going to shit again. Between having no deadlines (even self-imposed ones), and my already having the satisfaction of completing two different novels, I’ve got no drive to push forward.

The bad habits are dead. Long live the bad habits.

Whenever I stay at my grandmother’s in Illinois, I end up watching a lot of the Game Show Network.

It’s like having an alternate identity. Wisconsin Melissa finds game shows boring and pointless. It’s not that she hates them, it’s just that on the big list of Things to Do, they rank near the bottom, somewhere between bowling and clog dancing. Illinois Melissa, on the other hand, can’t get enough. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud…even an occasional Price is Right, although even Illinois Melissa has never fully understood that stupid game.

Anyway. I just got back from a three-day trip to IL, where once again I became a game show junkie. (In my defense, game shows really are the perfect programs to watch with one’s grandmother. They’re completely PG, completely inoffensive, and you don’t have to pay attention from one guest to the next, much less one episode to the next.) This time, however, I discovered (only like, four years after the rest of the country) Deal or No Deal. And became fascinated.

I’ve course I’ve heard of this show - Wisconsin Melissa doesn’t live under a rock - but I’ve never really understood the rules of the game. Girls with suitcases and the guy from “Little Monsters?” What? But, when forced to actually sit down and pay attention, I realized that the show is actually unnaturally simple. There’s a whole bunch of suitcases, and each one has a number inside, from 1 to a million, or something like that. The contestant has the comically hot models open one suitcase after another, and the very last suitcase left is the amount of money they get to take home.

And that’s pretty much it, except for the deal part - after each suitcase is opened, Howie Mandel takes a phone call from a mysterious shadowy figure (really?!) who offers the contest a certain amount of money to walk away now. So if the contestant opens a whole bunch of suitcases with really low numbers, Shadowy Figure offers a really high number for the contestant to walk away. Hence the “Deal or No Deal” title.

For being such a simple concept (there’s really no skill involved), the show is surprisingly engrossing. It’s all very excruciatingly spaced out, so you have to suffer through commercial breaks without knowing what the contestant will do. The two episodes I saw both featured very charismatic contestants, which made you really root for their success. They jazz it up with gimmicks like 80’s night, which featured Corey Feldman and Debbie Gibson (…ouch) as part of the “support team” - friends and family who show up to advise the contestant.

About that. This is what drives me crazy about “Deal or No Deal” - I’m convinced a conspiracy is afoot. For each contestant, there was inevitably a moment when any sane person would advise them to take the deal and walk away - but that would make the show too short. I saw a lady who was offered a $178,000 payout, but her own mother told her to take the risk and keep playing. The odds were 1 in eight that she’d make more than that, folks. The hell kind of mother does that? She ended up taking a deal three turns later - only by now, the offer was down to $15,000.

I suspect that in order to avoid having to do a huge payout, the producers simply paid off the “support team” to make wildly irrational suggestions. I mean, even factoring some leeway for the excitement and adrenaline rush of the moment, that was ridiculous advice.

I don’t know. In the end, I doubt I’ll be watching much more “Deal or No Deal,” because like most reality TV shows, it tends to piss me off. Unless they invent some kind of “choose your own adventure” version, where I can personally order the contestants to make the decisions I want. Then both Wisconsin Melissa and Illinois Melissa will be totally in.

Except for a five-year interval when I was at college, I have spent my entire life in Wisconsin.

That’s something like 23 summers in this state, so I am no stranger to the absurd heat that we Wisconsinites get to experience. My house didn’t have air conditioning until I was 15, and I spent one summer in Madison living on the second floor of a 100-year-old killer house that was apparently built with the intention of baking its inhabitants to death. Today the thermostat said 95 degrees, and with the humidity that pushed the heat index up to around 104. By 10 am I was wondering why I had bothered to take a shower.

I understand that living here comes with the burden of extreme weather, and let’s just say I’ve begrudgingly resigned myself to it, at least for now. But this is the first summer that I’ve had to deal with the heat…plus a toddler. No daycare, no preschool - just me, her, and humidity that would make the rainforest wince.

Of course, one of my key problems is how to keep her entertained, since it’s pretty much impossible for us to go for walks or play at the playground, activities we enjoyed early in the summer. But the boredom factor is only part of it. It’s so hot that I’m afraid to take her outside at all. Today I went so far as to go start the car a few minutes before we had to leave to run errands, just so the a/c could kick in before I put her in. I suddenly have to worry about Mattie getting burned by the buckles on her car seat (mind you, they’re not necessarily in the sun), and making sure she’s got a cup of water in her hand every second. I spent ten minutes trying to talk her into bringing her hard plastic doll along to run errands instead of her polar-fleece stuffed dog. And if I can actually find somewhere to take her for entertainment purposes, I have to weigh in the fact that we’ll be leaving the safety of our central air. (Dear former owner of my house: may God bless you. Seriously.)

The biggest problem, though, has got to be the mosquitos. Not only has this been a particularly hot and humid summer, it’s been a wet one, too. and that’s created what I’m calling the Mosquito Perfect Storm. (Or the rain being the Mosquito Third Heat, for you 30 Rock fans.) I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen them this bad - you can’t so much as run to the car without getting five new bites. The little suckers (get it?) are everywhere. Today in an attempt to entertain the baby, I put out an inflatable kiddie pool on the front lawn. She went apeshit for the thing, and would probably still be out there now if I had let her. But the whole time I was out there supervising, I was swatting mosquitos and fretting that they were draining her of her life essence. Even our cool-off activities are fraught with heat-related danger.

I gotta say, weather, the last thing I needed as a parent was a new challenge. Between bedtime, appetites, teething, keeping her busy, and teaching her not to hit people or stand on chairs, my dance card is pretty full.

It can be fall anytime now.

Greetings, blog devotees!

It does occasionally happen (though probably not nearly as often as it should) that I have no particular issues that I wish to blog about. Life is proceeding along nicely enough, as I am waiting to a). start school, b). hear back from my agent, who has been sending out my manuscript, and c). survive this godforsaken season. (I hate you, Summer. I will gather my weapons against you: air conditioning, television, and bug spray. Together we shall triumph! In waiting you out!)

In other words, I’m sort of in a holding pattern. As I am not interested in writing a crappy post that I don’t care about, I’m going to take a page (heh heh) from the book of my fellow author and Facebook friend, Alex Bledsoe, and open it up for questions and suggestions. Does anyone have any questions about my progress with motherhood, my writing, directions to the Beltline, etc? Anyone have a suggestion for a good blog topic? Someone, please, throw (/drop) me a line here. Seriously. If you’re reading this on Facebook and would prefer to ask anonymously, I believe you can do so on my website.

If nobody has any suggestions, I may have to start writing about politics. You’ve been warned.

Greetings, blog devotees!

It does occasionally happen (though probably not nearly as often as it should) that I have no particular issues that I wish to blog about. Life is proceeding along nicely enough, as I am waiting to a). start school, b). hear back from my agent, who has been sending out my manuscript, and c). survive this godforsaken season. (I hate you, Summer. I will gather my weapons against you: air conditioning, television, and bug spray. Together we shall triumph! In waiting you out!)

In other words, I’m sort of in a holding pattern. As I am not interested in writing a crappy post that I don’t care about, I’m going to take a page (heh heh) from the book of my fellow author and Facebook friend, Alex Bledsoe, and open it up for questions and suggestions. Does anyone have any questions about my progress with motherhood, my writing, directions to the Beltline, etc? Anyone have a suggestion for a good blog topic? Someone, please, throw (/drop) me a line here. Seriously. If you’re reading this on Facebook and would prefer to ask anonymously, I believe you can do so on my website.

If nobody has any suggestions, I may have to start writing about politics. You’ve been warned.

In theory, of all the different things I could write, a screenplay should be the easiest.

First, of course, there’s the fact that I’ve watched a million movies, and I’m a writer. But I also have a degree in film. At USC, there were three possible tracks within the Cinema-Television program: production, screenwriting, and critical studies. Production was for the hardcore students who were certain they wanted to direct. Screenwriting was for those who wanted to specifically be writers. And my program, critical studies, was really like the gen ed of film - a little of this, a little of that, and a great place for anyone who wanted to be in film but wasn’t sure exactly where they fit in. So I had a fundamental introduction in school, and outside of school I was an intern for NBC-Universal, where I spent half my time writing coverage (aka summary and analysis) of other people’s screenplays. Or, as I like to call it, the crash course in What Not to Do.

Furthermore, after over a year of editing my own writing, I think I can definitively say that my biggest strength is dialogue, and that’s pretty much all a screenplay is. Oh, you have to think about the scene, determining who’s going to be where, what action is happening, what everyone in the room is doing, and so on, but the biggest part of the writing is just dialogue. It’s actually very liberating to not have to worry about long descriptions (definitely my weakness as a writer) or the relaying of long thought processes. You just write how people talk.

So, with all that in mind, what I am having such a hard time?

I started a screenplay, now called “Fixing Jenna,” long before I began my first book. I wrote and wrote, I had a great time, I revised and read aloud and invited friends over for a ‘table read’ to help me get an ear for it…and then, after finishing 3/4 of the thing, I got stuck. I got myself stuck countless times on both of the books, but for some reason with the screenplay I just never seemed to be able to push through the stumble. I got distracted by my first book, immediately went into my second, and pushed “Jenna” to the back of my mind.

One of my goals this summer, after I completed and sent in “Dead Spots,” was to finally finish the stupid screenplay. Just for the sense of accomplishment. So I went back and took a look at it a few weeks ago, and I really liked most of it. I read all the way to the end of what I had, thought about it for a good long time, and realized that after writing two books and therefore giving myself another two years of experience, I was still completely stuck.

Here’s the deal: “Fixing Jenna” is a romantic comedy. I wanted to write in the genre because it so often pisses me off - the women are always neurotic messes and the men are flawless Everyguys who basically exist in life to tame the sassy career gal who just can’t get her love life together. Blah. I wanted to write about being young, and in love, and screwing it up, and whether you could fix someone after you broke them. I set the story up the way I wanted, which meant that in addition to writing more realistic characters, I still needed to embrace certain conventions of the genre. So I’ve got the beginning and the middle, and I’ve reached the part of the romantic comedy where there’s some big fight or obstacle that we’re not sure our protagonists will be able to get over, right before the big reunion and happy ending. In Runaway Bride, it’s when Julia Roberts finally runs from marrying Richard Gere. In When Harry Met Sally, it’s after the leads sleep together and Harry blows her off, causing her to give him the silent treatment. Will they get back together? Of course they will.

But how?

That’s where I am in my story, and I cannot figure out how to get my two leads back together. And yes, it has occurred to me that maybe they shouldn’t get together, and I might be okay with that (though I gotta admit, I’m rooting for them), but I don’t know how to get there, either. I can’t figure out a resolution, I guess. And I keep waiting for the lightning bolt of inspiration to knock me down with my own brilliance, but so far there have been nothing but clear skies. What to do?

Argh. Stupid screenplays. Don’t you understand you’re supposed to be easier for me?

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed a somewhat embarrassing number of posts relating to the kids’ show Blue’s Clues.

Here’s how my obsession began: a few weeks ago, Husband and I made the decision to stop watching risque TV shows and movies in Mattie’s presence. She’s getting to an age where she’s been paying more attention, and it’s just time to exorcise the naked boobies and vicious knife fights from our living room. (Insert obligatory naked boobie joke…HERE.) The new rule has cut down a shocking percentage of the shows and movies we like. Which is fine, because I don’t want to be the kind of mom who takes her four-year-old to Friday the 13th. It’s time to nip this in the bud.

Now, my insistence that Mattie not watch TV before the age of two has been well-documented, and my reasoning is sound. The American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as a bunch of doctors and common sense, have suggested that watching TV before two is bad for toddler’s little brains, and can even be linked to things like ADD and ADHD. Which is bad. So, since college, when I first started thinking about this kind of thing (because I was studying TV, not because I was ready for kids), I knew that any future progeny would be kept from the boob tube (get it?) until at least their second birthday.

Ah. Sweet, naive, college-aged Melissa. How you tickle me.

Here’s the thing: I’m home with Mattie all day. All day. I fill our week up with as many age-appropriate activities as we can afford - playgroup at the community center, storytime at the library, the park when it’s not too hot, the gym daycare, etc - but that still leaves a whole lot of time to fill. And while I would like to believe that I am a strong, dedicated mother who can withstand the temptation of watching any TV throughout the day, or allowing Mattie to watch anything before her next birthday, I think we all know that I am, in fact, not. I still watch the occasional TV-PG show in front of her, and once or twice a day (okay, sometimes three times, I’m awful) she gets to watch Blues Clues.

This usually happens in the morning, right when we wake up. Mattie is my alarm clock, so every morning I wake up when she fusses, throw on my glasses, and stumble towards her room, where she is usually standing with her blankie in one arm and Scout the Green Dog in the other, waiting for me with a desperate, pathetic look on her face. I scoop her up, (changing her diaper immediately if it’s in dire shape, which is more often than not), get us some cereal bars, and we turn on the Clues.

Now, in the mornings Mattie is just like me in two ways: first, she takes a while to fully wake up (during this time you should not bother her), and second, she doesn’t like to eat a big meal right away. So there we sit, me in my pajamas, Mattie in (usually) her pajama top and a fresh diaper, and we watch the show, which gives us both a chance to wake up a little and enjoy our first, small breakfast. Yes, I am possibly corrupting her tiny baby brain. But my consolation is knowing that if she’s watching TV, at least she’s watching a really great show.

I won’t go into a big description of the show, because many people have seen it, and most of the ones who haven’t probably don’t care, but you can find more information on it here. The funny part, for me, is how closely I’ve begun to watch and care about the show. For example, Steve, the original host, is the coolest ever, and his replacement Joe can suck it. The (successful) attempt to create a live-action spinoff by showing a talking Blue puppet is a complete and utter sell-out. Boo, hiss. I’ve memorized all the songs Steve (screw you, Joe!) sings about getting the mail and solving the puzzle and the thinking chair. It makes me happy that Blue, who is, of course, blue, is actually a girl, disregarding the old stereotype that blue is for boys and pink is for girls - however, I constantly forget and think Blue is male, until I am reminded. Steve, the coolest host ever, does awesome puppet voices. I can’t figure out what’s going on with (stupid) Joe’s sweaters - are there no mirrors in this magical house?

And so on. The thing that I like best about this show is that it’s not in a “magazine” format like most kids’ shows. Magazine format means it’s a series of short choppy videos, like on Sesame Street or Yo Gabba Gabba. Each episode of Blue’s Clues tells one linear story, which I love, without being boring. The sad thing is, they’re no longer making new episodes - at some point, we will have seen all of them and be done. But hopefully by then Mattie will be old enough for something else that’s awesome, like the Muppet Show or Batman: the Animated Series.

Or, you know, she could play outside or something.

Okay, bit of a funny situation. Mattie’s had a rough week, physically - she’s taken two major headers one down two carpeted stairs, and one on actual asphalt, so she’s pretty banged up. Because she’s been so tough, when I was at Target today I decided to buy her a little present. Budget: $10.

And there, in the Clearance section of the Eau Claire Target, I hit the jackpot: a Visit to the Doctor doll. It’s a baby that comes with a stethoscope, thermometer, cup, etc. What better way to reward my daughter for her strength in the face of…asphalt…while simultaneously preparing her for her upcoming 18-month checkup? NO BETTER WAY, I tell you.

So I grabbed a doll - automatically taking the last white one - and took it to the front to pay. However, the doll rang up at full price, a full $12 more than the clearance tag. At that point, I realized something: only the black dolls were on sale.

(If any of you are offended that I’m using the word “black” instead of the PC term “African-American,” I apologize and refer you to my black friends in college, who assured me that it’s cool.)

The manager explained that no, this wasn’t racist, it was just because this particular Target had a half-dozen black dolls and only one white doll. It was, she explained, just like when they have too many pink skirts, and only the pink version of that skirt goes on sale. (Sidebar: does anyone find this analogy kind of wrong when it comes to little versions of humans?) I wasn’t about to pay the $22 for the white doll, so I was left with a choice: get something else entirely, or go ahead with the black baby doll.

I admit, I looked. In fact, I looked around for almost an hour, trying to find an equally cool doll within my price range. I saw dolls expensive dolls that cooed and a weird doll that I can only assume was called “Baby Possessed.” There was a doll that could poop (…why?) and the generic version of the Visit to the Doctor doll, which had this whole computer thing going on so it could blush and squeal when you put the thermometer in her mouth, which I found slightly disturbing. But nothing fit both my price range and Mattie’s specifications. Why, you may ask, didn’t I just buy Mattie the black doll and be done with it? I pride myself on being all liberal and equal rights-oriented, how could I have a problem with Mattie having a black doll? I don’t. But here’s a little taste of my thought process.

If the new doll was to be treated anything like her current favorite, Scout the Stuffed Dog, the doll would be going everywhere with us. And we have a family wedding coming up next weekend, and we’ll be around lots of people, and I was just afraid that the doll would become a Thing. Raised eyebrows, subtle startled expressions, pointed comments from my grandmother, and so on. An 18-month-old shouldn’t have to be dealing with this stuff, right? And yes of course, I would love to assume that everyone would just be cool and go with it, but what if they wouldn’t? I’m all for fighting the good fight, but do I really want to make a thing out of my choice in dolls for my toddler? Couldn’t I just wait and be really really cool when she wants to marry a black guy?

On the other hand, when I was growing up, black people were so…other, simply because there were none in our town. Oh, there were black people on television, but there were talking cartoon rabbits there, too, so people of color just didn’t seem like part of my reality. I actually remember the first time I saw an African-American family in person, on a trip to Noah’s Ark. This wasn’t my parents’ fault, of course, but I still don’t want Mattie to grow up thinking that white people only is the norm. Maybe having a black doll would keep her from thinking that way.

These are the thoughts going through my mind at Target: big racial-issue stuff, while I’m wandering around looking at generic white dolls with a toddler in a cart. Weird, right?

So here’s the conclusion I finally came to: I was way overthinking it. The Visit to the Doctor doll was the one I wanted for Mattie, so that was the one I was gonna get for Mattie. The color of her plastic skin didn’t really matter, as long as it had all its accessories and a nice outfit that Mattie could take off and put on.

So. A triumph of open-minded thinking or a missed opportunity for a powerful statement? You decided. I’ve decided I no longer care. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a very sick doll that needs some attention.

So, a couple of weeks ago, it came to our attention (via a loud THUMP) that Mattie can escape from her crib. This is a pretty typical toddler milestone, but Mattie’s a little ahead of schedule - at less than 18 months, the girl needed to be put in a big girl bed.

So I (and by that, I mean Husband) set to work transformering her crib into a “big girl” bed, which basically meant removing one long side of the railing and installing two small guardrails that don’t keep her in, but DO help prevent her from rolling off in the night. Mission accomplished, right? Sleep problem eradicated?

Not even close.

See, this is where lazy or uninformed parenting will come back to bite you in the ass. Mattie had never learned to fall asleep in her crib - in fact, she hates the crib. In the grand scheme of Mattie’s life she has many enemies, including the car, mosquitoes, occasionally Tucker, vegetables, and naptime, but her true archnemesis is that crib. For the first 17 months of her life, we let Mattie fall asleep in the living room and then transported her to the crib. Big mistake. Huge.

So now Husband and I found ourselves in quite the pickle. Not only was Mattie going to have to adjust to sleeping in a big girl bed, the way every other toddler does, but she also had to adjust to falling asleep in her own bed and not getting out of it. Since my daughter appears to be at least as stubborn as I am, this has proved nearly impossible. We tried everything we and the internet could think of: establishing a routine, giving her a snack, giving her a bottle, withholding the bottle. reading in bed, not reading in bed, everything. Eventually, we got her to the point where she would be on her bed without screaming, but only as long as one of us was on the floor next to her, and she still woke up at least three times in the night. (Dear Mattie, if I wanted to get up three times a night again, I would just have another frickin’ baby.) Defeated parents finally put an air mattress in her room for maximum convenience.

After nearly two weeks of that, you can imagine how Husband and I were ready to pull our hair out. Also, having hallucinations from sleep deprivation. I spoke to Mattie’s doctor, and she firmly told me that we had to do the one thing we’ve been avoiding: lock Mattie in the room.

See, the whole “cry it out” method, which we used to get Mattie to start sleeping through the night, doesn’t work quite as well once the kid can easily climb out of bed. Or rather, it still works, but there’s an additional, heartbreaking emotional factor. You have to lock the kid in the room and tolerate hearing her little fists banging on the door and her tiny screams as she calls for you. I hate, hate this plan. It seems cruel, and I can’t figure out why even considering it hasn’t gotten us arrested.

But we’re out of other ideas. So, being a strong, responsible parent, I did the only thing I could think of: I chickened out and left Husband to handle this. Last night I was helping a friend with a short film project, and tonight I’ll be at work, so I get to miss the big trauma for the first two nights, which I figure will be the worst. No, I’m not comfortable with leaving Tyler to do this on his own, but I’m even less comfortable with being there.

I know. I’m not only the worst mother ever, but the worst wife as well. But I maintain that while “crying it out” may be the only way to make this adjustment happen, and the whole family will be sleeping much better in a few weeks, I just don’t think you can ask the mommy to do this. It’s too hard.

I’ve often thought, over the course of Mattie’s short life, some preemptive guilt regarding our future second child. Sometimes I look at her clapping her hands for Max, or jutting out her chin to grin at me, or cuddling me when we first wake up, and I think, “there’s no way I can love another kid this much.” There’s just something about your first, right? But I’ve realized that the second child does get something in exchange: hopefully we’ll correct all these screwups. I bet if I had like, seven or eight kids, that last one would be perfect.

The new computer is here, and I am out of commission no more. Kind of. I still have to take it to the Mac store for cloning (yes, at first I was furious by the notion that I have to pay $100 to have my old computer data transferred over, but my rage was tempered by the hilarity of the term “cloning"), which means I have to give it away for another day or two, but still. It’s here.

For you geeks out there, the new computer is a MacBook Pro (just like the old one), only faster, lighter, smaller, and with way more memory, which was always a problem with my old 180 gig hard drive. I do miss the fifteen inch screen, but it was like an extra $400. Sometimes a girl’s gotta settle for something a couple of inches shorter, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, after two full weeks in limbo, I’m thrilled to be able to write again. Look for more blogs coming up in the next couple of days (there’s lots to catch up on, including our war with the baby regarding sleep habits, the process of sending my book out to publishers, and most importantly, my thoughts on the new Predators movie), but this is just a shout-out to say, “I’m BAAAAAAAAAACK!”

Greetings, devoted blog readers. Since I’m sure you guys are just perishing from lack of blogs, I wanted to drop a line to let you know I’ll be out of commission for a few more days - my faithful Mac finally died, and the new one (thank you, student loans) is on the way. Stay tuned!

A couple of years ago, at one of the Madison Writers Institute conferences, I went to this class on marketing yourself. Up until then, my appearances at the conference had mostly been writing-oriented - I had, after all, never taken a single creative writing course in any of my formal schooling, so I had a lot to catch up on. This time, though, I finally felt ready to branch out a little.

And that’s where I first learned about the power of Twitter. I had heard of Twitter, of course, but only as something that people used to spend time with Ashton Kutcher. At the conference, though, they basically told us that if we wanted to be writers, we had to do certain things, beyond, you know, writing the book. And having a Twitter account was part of that.

See, it used to be that authors would do these things called book tours, where they would travel around and read parts of their books to live crowds at bookstores (and by “crowds,” I mean 4-7 people). And that was pretty much the beginning and end of an author’s involvement in marketing. Now, however, the landscape has changed, and publishers want an active author who participates via something called a platform. A platform is basically what you can bring to the table, marketing-wise. Maybe you’re a University of Wisconsin professor, and your book can be marketed throughout all the UW campuses. Maybe you wrote a book about rock-climbing, and you’re involved with different rock-climbing organizations, all of whom will promote your work. Maybe your blog has a rabid fan base, and all those thousands of visitors each day can be counted on to purchase copies. And so on. It’s a combination of your background, your book’s topic, and how much or little you interact with the public, and it’s incredibly important.

That’s where things like Twitter and Facebook come in. When you’re trying to sell a book, publishers will be interested in how many friends you have, because each of those friends is a potential book buyer. So as I’m trying to get a platform together for my agent to present to publishers, I have an assignment: get more friends.

Ha.

Guess what, folks? Making friends wasn’t easy in third grade, and it isn’t much easier now, despite the overwhelming access to others that we have now, thanks to the internet. With Facebook, this is my own fault - I always considered Facebook to be something I wanted to keep private, for me to communicate with people who actually know me. So I’ve turned down a lot of friend requests, and I’ve made no effort to get new ones. Whoops.

With Twitter, though, it’s another story. How the hell do you make Twitter friends? I’ve had two ideas. First, I asked all my Facebook friends to be my Twitter friends, too, which is kind of cheating but who cares. And second, I’ve been trying to tweet to celebrities.

I know, it’s super douche-y, am I right? Trying to piggyback off the fame of others kind of makes me nauseous, but it’s come to my attention that if I make a clever comment to a celebrity as a response to one of their tweets, people notice. Still, this isn’t exactly a great strategy. If anyone has ideas on how I can…um…get more friends, I’d love to hear them. Unless it’s even sleazier. Then I’m out.

Oh yeah, and if you’d like to take this blog as the sort of shameless self-promotion that it kind of is, you can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lisolson.