Would you give up a rent-controlled fireplace studio in Manhattan for a guy?

(In between re-writes of my new novel, Fortune's Daughters,  I took a fun break to review The Dollhouse, placed in my hands by Penguin/Random House.  PUb date 8/23/16)

During a week of ninety plus heat in East Hampton I liked having The Dollhouse, a summer read, to keep my mind cool and engaged. The Barbizon Hotel (The Dollhouse) was THE place where proper young women from small towns sought shelter when they arrived in New York City.  Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Grace Kelly Lauren Bcall were among the many aspiring actresses who stayed there. Future writers Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson—and Sylvia Plath, who set part of The Bell Jar at a fictional Barbizon were residents.

It gets better.  It’s 2016 and thirtysomething Rose Lewin,  think The Devil Wears Prada, is a smart likeable woman who has been done wrong by a callous boyfriend and a callous television news station. Her new job at a trendy content factory is in jeopardy. Rose gave up a perfect, rent-controlled fireplace laden studio for the creep and now must scrounge around for shelter in pricey New York while he places his ex-wife in their luxe Barbizon condo. This fact alone made me want to kill the duplicitous boyfriend. With career and real estate demons nipping at her heels, Rose has one tiny safety net – a story idea about the old days at the Barbizon and the women from the era who still live there, segregated in musty apartments while the rest of the building is a basket of luxe trophy pads.

The novel alternates the present and the past, as Rose pursues her story to unearth the details of the tragic accident that befell Darby, an Ohioan who arrived at the Barbizon to attend Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School and fulfill her dream of being the best secretary in the world to an important man.Will the mystery of Darby's life be revealed?  Will Rose stop being a victim and take control of her life?  Will her partner, the hunky photog, stick around when all else crumbles?  Will the ambitious ex boyfriend get what's coming to him?   

If you liked the era of Mad Men and if you were rooting for the heroine of The Devil Wears Prada, The Dollhouse will satisfy if you can do without much emotional depth.Good twists and surprises.

Whatever you have done, let it go. Let it all go. It's all right.

( This is an excerpt from my book, One Hundred Open Houses.  It has a hopeful message in it.  Some readers don't like this book but the ones that do, like it a lot.)

 

Given my present thought process, something really strange happened in church on Sunday. Father O’Connell is on vacation and this other priest said mass.  He was quite old and we could hardly hear him.  

We were prepared to just sit through it, the way we did when we had a substitute teacher.  Almost in a whisper, he began talking about reconciliation – that’s what they call confession now.  He said,  “Whatever you have done, let it go.  You aren’t children anymore with a laundry list of sins – I hit my brother, I told a lie, I stole some candy - in order to be okay with God.  Just get rid of everything – let it go and you will be closer to Jesus. If you’ve had an abortion, if you’ve been abusive to your family – just let it go. Let it all go.  It’s all right. One of you,  “he emphasized, “sitting here today, will be transformed.” 

The entire congregation remained still.  Almost dumbstruck.  We weren’t prepared to actually hear something we could use never mind being transformed.  After church, I saw this young handsome man – not your typical devoted Catholic - go up to the priest and say – “I’m not from this parish but that is the best homily I have ever heard.”  There was a long line of people and they were all saying much the same thing.  They had been longing to find a way to get rid of all the things they were ashamed of doing and this brilliant old priest had told them it was okay to let it all go. He was telling us that he was certain – without a doubt – that this was not only okay, but also necessary.

After mass, I did something I seldom do – something all of us seldom do – I sat in the living room.  I sat on the couch I had bought at the Bloomingdale’s outlet store.  There was nothing to do in the living room except look around.  You couldn’t cook there or eat or watch television. The living room, I have to tell you, is a useless room that we have been told is necessary.  I felt as if I was visiting and all the stuff in there was new to me.   After the “letting go” talk, if you take it seriously, you have a lot of space in your head to think about other things.

It has resulted in putting me in a strange state of lethargy.  I feel all dry and papery.  I’m made of parchment paper. I keep thinking that contrary to my current fervor for staying alive, there might be something to dying.  No more humidifying and dehumidifying.  No more coughing at night or worrying about anything.  If nothing else, the weight issue is moot.

When you send the e-mail down to your psyche saying, “hey, it’s time to open up, we want some life changing moves up here,” it reacts.   I had stated a purpose and begun a plan and although it wasn’t frontal lobotomy or entering a non-speaking religious order, it was change and there’s nothing like change to make the psyche squeeze out a miserly bit of self-revelation.

What was revealed to me on that chilly for June Sunday morning was that no matter what I did or where I lived or if I chose to pitch a tent in the Mojave dessert there was a fist sized hunk of worry smack in the center of my chest and if I didn’t address it, I was not going to really move. 

There was no media noise so I was aware of the silence in the house.  In my Sunday morning clarity, I knew that it was a hunk of heaviness that had been sitting in my chest for a very long time.    I went into my default site of things to worry about, the kids’ safety, my health, mental illness and plumbing problems in a town where plumbers are the new rock stars.   If you’re not going to follow the blueprint for the American Dream, you have to fight hard not to think ill of yourself.

This wasn’t about the kids or the house. This hard impenetrable thing was a hunk of worry about me, Rebecca, and what had happened to her.   I bypassed my instinct to find some quick answer and thought about what my life was like from moment to moment. What I said to certain people and what I said to others.  Was I authentic with anyone? Did I have enough friends? What mattered to me? Did anyone really love me?  Was there anyone who couldn’t live without me?  Do you even want someone who can’t live without you?  No, you don’t!  I’ll give you a profile of that man without even meeting him.  Needy, needy, needy.  And possibly in need of long-term therapy.  You want someone who can live without you but would like to spend some time with you. 

I had an m.o.  As long as I could find the irony in everything that happened, I could make a case for an existence that resided on the sidelines while everyone else was actually living. Being ironic was no substitute for living but so help me I thought it was.   Louise was living all of the time.  She knew at least a dozen couples that she and her husband saw on a regular un-ironic basis.  She had friends she had known for forty years. She played tennis with her friends and went to baby showers.  She had a sequential life.  She definitely did not start over every morning.

I thought about my premise that a move outside my comfort zone would jump-start a new life, a new routine, new connections and a new me. I was definitely ready to re-define myself.  As what?  A spunky middle-aged woman?    Then this British guy was on Oprah and he wrote a book on happiness and he said you would never be happy if you had a destination addiction.  First, why anyone would listen to a Brit talk on the psychology of happiness is beyond me.  But I did take a little interest in his “destination addiction” theory.  He was saying that as long as you thought that your happiness depended on something that was going to happen in the future, you were a dead duck.  Or an unhappy duck. What I got from that Brit was that if I thought I was going to jump start my stalled writing career by moving to a monastic cell in New York City, I was stupid, stupid, stupid. And misguided.  And delusional.   I had to start being happy right here in Huffy The House. And while moving was a good idea, I would already be the committed reclaimed writer when I arrived.

So there was no avoiding it then.  I had to begin thinking of the story I wanted to tell.    What story was I just bursting to tell?  First of all, no writer is bursting to write anything.  Most are bursting to keep from writing.  Writing is incredibly hard and beside it, everything else appears incredibly easy.  But this particular moment, I kept still and continued thinking until I had an “aha” moment that sounded so simple, I didn’t trust it but since I had nothing else, I went with it.  Maybe the story was me!   The routines, the bad habits, the small pleasures, the calls to the utility companies, the yanking of weeds, the phantom tandem life that I was going to live one day.  Not this life but something better. Maybe this was the better life – maybe what I was writing down in my journal would make a fabulous story. Maybe my life was the story of the century.  Every single day of it  – Louise and Shana and the rep for the Dubai place and Itzonlyphil were what was in my life and if I shaped what I was writing in my journal into the odyssey it had become, I could make sense of it for myself and maybe for others, too.  Maybe what was in my head was not the jumbled thoughts of a textbook AADD but LIFE.  

 I had just read an article in the New Yorker about the dictionary of mental disorders (I’m thinking someone is sitting around saying:  there’s stealing and let’s call that kleptomania and there’s unsubstantiated euphoria and let’s call that manic behavior) There was a phrase in the article that I liked.  It said someone had an unruly inner life.  That’s what I had to document!   My unruly inner life.  I would shape what I had been writing in the journal into a book.

 It was Sunday morning and my instinct was to turn on the television and watch Meet The Press. Anything not to test my new theory that, at best, seemed weak.   I went to the computer instead.   I wrote the date and Chapter One – 9-G I wasn’t looking for an apartment…

 I started and before I knew it, Meet The Press was over and so were the McLaughlin Report and even Lydia’s Family Table.  I had just plunged into the story in an unruly way.  I introduced the old priest and what he told us and Ms. DuBois at the bank and KooKoofor$ and also Ben and Harry and even my mother and my fear of the voodoo she might be doing on my life.  When I was done for the day I felt spaced out the way you do when you spend a day at the beach and the bright sun glinting off the water makes you feel surreal.  And the salt air makes the indoors feel too quiet and unfamiliar. And your eyes can’t adjust.  I turned off the computer and had a cup of coffee.  There was no milk so I put some Turkey Hill vanilla Ice Cream in it.  I drank it slowly, in the living room. Just me sitting there.

"Don't show me this message again" Redux.

Note:  This is an excerpt from my favorite book: One Hundred Open Houses.    This is the book that saved me from total deterioration at a certain time in my life. My agent took me to lunch in Sag Harbor.  We changed restaurants twice.  We'd look at each other and say, You want to leave?  Let's go.  After we finally settled down and started to eat, she said, Write another book.  It's time.  I like the book Julie/Julia.  I like the structure - cooking all of the recipes in the one book.  What if I did one where the structure was looking for an apartment and going to open houses, I asked? Great, she said.  Do that.

One of the happy outcomes of having a bestseller (Three Daughters) is the spillover reader interest in One Hundred Open Houses)

Don't show me this message again!

The pseudo-porn magazine contact has sent me an e-mail with a huge file attachment  because his parent company has had ten lawyers drawing up the contract.  Lawyers on staff of large corporations are lazy and careless.  They send you boiler plate stuff written in the Middle Ages and when you point out that the terms are impossible to enact, they tell you to just cross it out.  When I try to open the attachment, the message says that the file is compressed.  I e-mail back that the file is compressed and he tells me to use WinZip to open it.  That’s like telling me I have to turn into a crocodile to open it – in other words, impossible.   I look on my desktop and there is an icon of a vice squeezing a file cabinet as when you want to glue furniture. I click on the icon and whoa! WinZip appears right over the e-mail. It says. “Do you want to unzip this now?”    I love it when the message is clear.  

Once I called Dell for advice on an e-mail problem and the tech person in Sri Lanka or wherever told me to check “Don’t show me this message again.”  The minute I checked it I realized I needed the message to get to my e-mail. He said, “I’ve been working here 10 years and I know pretty much and I could probably help you solve your e-mail problem but I have to follow the rules.”  I should have known he was telling me in a subtle way to urge him to help me but (not knowing the next help station was going to charge me to undo the damage from their bad advice,) I said, “Oh, that’s all right.”  I think the people in Calcutta or Sri Lanka have better ethics.  They are more empathetic and want to do the right thing unlike American telephone companies.  When I called back almost in tears, a soft voiced man said:  “I know one way to help you get that message back.  It’s called ‘system restore’ and it allows you to go back to any date you select and start all over again.” And that’s exactly what I did.  I went back to May 10, a Monday, when I still had not checked: “Don’t show me this message again.”

Imagine if you could do this in real life.  I’d go back to 1999 and be rich again.  And then I’d go back to 1960 and accept a date with Butch Ordway.  Or I’d go back… oh, hell, I can’t go back.  

When I first came to work here, I didn’t know how to transfer a call.  I was on overload for about two weeks and even with a gun to my head I couldn’t have told you what color the walls were.  Now I’ve used WinZip. 

I open the contract and try to compare what we sent to the pseudo-porn people and what they are sending to us.  It’s tedious and confusing and I already have a slight headache

Before work today, I went to see the dentist to see what is making the right side of my face hurt. They took an x-ray of the pain site and I thought the technician was going to look at the x-rays scream and say: oh, my god, your teeth are all messed up.  That’s not what happened.  She said my sinus was resting on the nerve. If you thought they were going to say: you don’t need us, go home, no charge.  That was not the case. The dentist looked in my mouth and said I had some fillings that were decomposing and now he’s going to do a whole bunch of things that are going to cost a lot of money.   I’m obsessing about it because in the moment of relief that my teeth were okay, I relaxed my attention and the medical establishment swooped in and mapped out a plan to keep me there for a year and separate me from thousands of dollars.

Three calls to the dentist’s office and now his whole desk staff has doubts about me.  I want to know why he can’t do everything in one visit.  I want to know how much it is all going to cost.  I want to know whether it is necessary.   For some reason the woman on the phone finds these questions unreasonable and obscure, as if no other patient has asked them before.  In the medical establishment, if you ask a question the staff always sees you as trouble. It’s our own fault.  The rules that the medical man is the king and the patient is damn lucky to be in his presence were made a long time ago.  So I have to let this bullshit dentist have his way about “decomposing”: fillings that haven’t given me one iota of trouble. On top of that, without any permission from me, he has numbed the entire left side of my face and ground down one poor tooth to a nub. “You’ll need a crown on that one,” he says.   Yes, I obsess but this dentist is nuts.  Trust me, he is nuts.

There was something on the news today that vindicates my theory that you should never have a medical procedure by the ‘top man.’ Every horror story I’ve ever heard about a procedure is always prefaced with the words ‘he’s supposed to be the top man.’

This man went in for a knee operation and when he comes out, the nurse is wheeling him to his room and says casually:  “Well you have a new left knee.” And the patient says, ”It was supposed to be the right knee.  The doctor marked it.”  Sure enough there’s a big x on the right knee but the numbskull replaced the left knee.  And the hospital is only awarding him half a million dollars.  I would have ruined that lazy crazy bastard.  I’m ready to stab that dentist who ground down my poor tooth. If someone replaced a perfectly good knee and left me with the same problem I came in with, I would never be done hunting him down.  Dr. Feldman was the name in case you need knee surgery.

I can’t stop thinking about that dentist that absolutely ruined two of my teeth and drilled them down as if he were excavating for a new subway or something.   Why do people become dentists anyway, to be legally aggressive?  Now my mouth hurts and I can’t eat peacefully. I guess I shouldn’t complain about that.

On top of this, Shana’s dog has pooped in the office and in order to kill the smell they sprayed the kind of floral scent that gives you a big headache.  I just read a story about a woman who was frequently ‘employee of the month’ but had to quit because of the excessive scents people wore to the office.  While I’m talking about scent assaults, I may as well call your attention to the soap Lever 2000.  I went up to my second floor one day because I smelled the overpowering scent of cheap perfume mixed with stale sweat.  I thought a cologne-crazed robber might be hiding up there.  The smell was suffocating and it was coming from an unwrapped bar of Lever 2000.  I began to feel nauseous and had to take it far out of the house and throw it away.  I would vote for any candidate that would outlaw perfumed soaps, shampoos or anything else.  Thank god for scent-free All.

Shana has no reprimand for the dog.  She loves, loves, loves the dog.  Twice the dog has done number two in the office.  Once right next to the hardest working employee who takes twelve hours to tell you something that could be said in half a sentence.  However, she claims to work until two in the morning (which, by the way, is Shana’s dream employee).  If you worked past seven at night, she would hire you forever even if you were dealing drugs.

So the hard worker had to go out and buy Febreze and clean up the poop and spray everywhere.  But then she said a brilliant thing and a courageous one, too.  She told Shana, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners.

I know too many people who are blindly in love with animals. Peta petitioned the government not to give Timothy McVey any meat for his last meal. The reasoning was why should one more living thing be killed for the monster. Ay, mommie!   I know people who prefer their pets to humans and many of them are women who never had children.  These people are perfectly okay with having the dog knock you down or put his muddy paws on your best silk dress. They let cats sit on the dinner table before and after you eat and only say, “Now Fluffy get off there,” in that tone that Fluffy has learned means “I love you so much, you can sit on my toast for all I care.” And Fluffy does want to sit on the toast especially when it’s still warm. 

When Oprah was on Ellen, they had a dog love competition.

Ellen:  What makes you happiest?

Oprah:  Being with my dogs. 

Ellen:  How many do you have.

Oprah:  Three and I’m getting two more.

Oprah:  I don’t understand people who don’t love dogs.

Ellen:  Me either.  Where are you going after the show?

Oprah:  To play with my dogs in the dog park.

Ellen:  I’ll go with you.

One of these things is not like the others

This post is for all my sisters and brothers who self-publish and get "customer reviews" and receive some quizzical reviews that make them scratch their heads.

First, I am not complaining or whining.  Really. I have had some scathing reviews that should have sent me to bed in a dark room.  I picked myself up and kept going.   I've had reader reviews that said my writing was disjointed, confusing, too long, too short, too sexual, too boring, jumped around, couldn't be followed, had pages missing,  punctuated by an imbecile, punctuated by less than an imbecile, had a horrible ending, etc.  I've had readers say they wanted to throw the book across the room.  Did throw the book across the room. Wanted to throw the book at me. I've had many readers say in their review that they gave fewer stars because the book should have been longer.  The book in question was 720 pages.

The reviewing system at Amazon is like the wild, wild west: thrilling, rough, scary and seductive.

In the screenshot below, a frustrated customer who didn't get her book and couldn't get satisfaction, put her complaint where she thought it would do the most good.  If I had her e-mail, I would gladly send her a book.  BTW, Amazon is always diligent about customer satisfaction and I'm certain they will make this right.

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, Amazon walks into mine.

I've been on one of the most interesting journeys in my publishing career. Many readers of this blog are in the self-publishing business and they might find the details interesting.

First a recap of my self-publishing history.  In 2009, I could not have given you a clear definition of the word "digital."  I probably still can't.  The idea of Lazarus-raising my trad published, out of print books from their dusty graves on my bookshelf and bringing them back to life was not incubating in my brain.  After twenty years as an author, the writing spirit had been leached out of me by the crushing reality of traditional publishing.

Enter Jeff Bezos, the patron saint of writers. Mr. Bezos had set up something called KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing and he was saying to writers.  "Hey, stop crying. I have this nice big space.  Come over and bring your novel or memoir or how-to or short story or cookbook or diary. I won't send you a rejection letter. You can publish your books on KDP for free. Nada, nil, zero. I'll give you good shelf space visible to the millions of eyeballs I command.  You can use my space as long as you want.  Out of print?  Not on my watch.  I'll let you decide the book's cover design. I'll let you decide how much to charge. I'll let you keep most of the money.  If you regret the ending you wrote for that urban romance, I'll let you write a different one, slap it into your book and re-publish.   AND all of this can be done in less than an hour.   WAIT!  WHAT???

One day, some of us (my friend, Sandra Scoppettone and my e-friend, Ruth Harris, are examples), washed our faces, put on our big girl shoes and began an astonishing new chapter in our publishing lives. Jeff Bezos gave us bizzarro publishing, the complete opposite of the punishing paradigm practiced by the big six. The old pubs took the novel you had worked on for two years, waited another year to publish it and then pretended they'd never heard of it. Writers were too dumbstruck to understand and too grateful to complain and too downtrodden to even examine.  Prozac was our friend.  Pubs didn't do this on purpose because that would have taken work and planning and I swear to you, they did not know how to do work or plan.  They knew how to sit at their massive desks (piled with un-read and/or rejected manuscripts) in their high floor offices and they definitely knew how to go to lunch at the Four Seasons or Michaels.  One of the anomalies of the otherwise dismal experience of being trad pubbed was the expensive one-time lunch (the last time you would see your editor.)  Here are some of the celebs I saw or met while at my one-time (per book) lunches.  Lillian Hellman (short and stout); Dwight Gooden (modest); David Letterman (boyish).   

Fast forward to Saint Bezos.  In addition to his global e-store Mr. Bezos gifted us with more astonishing perks, we could sell our e-books 24/7 (yes, while we slept).  Let me repeat that because it bears repeating.  We sold our e-books 24/7. We knew within minutes when we had made a sale BECAUSE we had a real time tabulation of our sales and could check the tabulation page 24/7. If we chose, we could put our books in an off-price sale for a few days or even make them free.  It was all under our control.  The KDP community shared ideas and experiences.  We learned what marketing  ploys worked best.  We read each other's books and put up reviews.

The early glory days of self-publishing have undergone changes.  Other sites besides Amazon have opened.  There's a place called Smashwords that acts as a distributor and broadcasts your titles to other retailers.  In recent years retail sites have made it possible to upload manuscripts on their sites using the Amazon model. 

The big trad publishers after getting off their high horses and realizing they didn't have the e-rights to all those books they neglected and then dumped into remainder bins, finally woke up to what was going on and became upset.  They did not like the renegade quality of what was going on.  There was no role for them.  There were no gatekeepers to keep out the riff raff.  They tightened the contracts, clumsily joined the revolution and even tried to sweet talk naive authors into letting them publish their e-books.  Most writers were savvy enough to do it themselves. 

So let's be realistic. Is there a lot of poorly written junk on KDP?  It depends on your taste.  There seems to be an audience for everything.  There have been dozens of breakout star authors who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars with their self-published books after years of rejection from the trad pubs.  Some of them sign with traditional publishers after initial success but the contracts are more in their favor.

In the early years, you could sell a boatload of e-books by reducing the price to 99 cents.  What you lost in revenue you made up in volume.  There was also a maneuver that gamed the ranking system by making a book available for free and then reaping algorithm induced visibility sales when the book went back to regular price.  Those maneuvers are not as reliable as they once were.  The most reliable marketing device is probably a lot of good reviews from readers.  In recent years, e-mail off-price advertisers like BookBub have had remarkable success selling books.  If they take your book (they have an editorial review process), you are likely to sell hundreds of books within a two or three day period and the glow remains for a few days after.  I used BookBub regularly and that is how my book Daughters received a slew of good reviews and caught the attention of Amazon Publishers.

A few years ago, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) decided to use his own great publishing platform and get into the book publishing business.  Amazon became a PUBLISHER.  They were not like the old publishers.  They knew how to work.  They knew how to market.  They knew how to steer their millions of eyeballs to the books they published. 

Last spring, Amazon approached me and they asked to buy one of my books.  They had NOTICED it because of all the great reviews.  WAIT. WHAT?   There are over a million books in the Kindle Store. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, Amazon walks into mine. No, wait that's from Casablanca.  Of the million plus books in all of the Kindle Store, in all the world, Amazon has noticed mine?  

I knew Amazon was not my father's publishing house.  This was a genius marketing/service juggernaut that knew the emotional make up of the population and how to work it.  Even so, I hesitated.  Two people in my life said to me:  put down the telephone, go to your computer, open the Amazon e-mail and say "yes."

We are still in the honeymoon stage (publication was in late November) but I have not been disappointed.  In another post I will detail the Amazon publishing journey and all of the eye-opening differences from my previous trad pubbed experience.

Three Daughters, by the way, is #46 today in the Kindle 100 bestsellers.  It is also an Amazon special deal on sale for $1.99 (that's for 720 pages!)

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #46 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

• #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Sagas
• #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Sagas
• #3 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Saga

 My author rank

Amazon Author Rankbeta (What's this?)

#8 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction

#10 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

#17 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#22 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#34 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction

"I hate grease and what it stands for." Vita in Mildred Pierce (redux)

(I've been away living with a three year old so forgive if I re-post something from the past. All of the sentiments are still true. The stuff about the e-books is current.)

One of the headlines on the Yahoo home page one morning is: Are repairs to your house keeping you awake at night. Yahoo knows me inside out and there’s little I can do about it.

This is what I lie awake thinking about my house:  The topmost gutter that is now too scary to reach and is therefore clogged with two years worth of rotting leaves that will eventually totally rot and ruin something called a soffit.  I used to be brave enough to climb out the window of the top floor bedroom onto the slope of the roof, hold on to the projecting gable trim until I reached the flat part, climb onto it, get on my stomach and inch my way like a paratrooper at Iwo Jima to get to the gutter grab the contents and put them in the Hefty bag I had stuffed in my pocket. When I was solidly on the topmost flat part, I even had the presence to survey my entire .16 acre and sneak a peek at a few other yards.   Of course, I had on my best ground gripping sneakers and also my best underwear in case I fell and died.

Last fall I climbed out the window three times and could not summon the courage to continue.  There was about a two-foot spread where I could not reach the gable trim and had to just crawl un-tethered up the slope and I could not do it. I think about those rotting leaves and have climbed out onto the roof several times and climbed back in, locked the window, pulled down the shades and gone downstairs.

The second thing I think about is the state of my eighty year old septic system. When you see that cesspool guy pull into your driveway with that huge barrel-shaped truck and his t-shirt reads:  “your s**t is our bread and butter” you realize that you can pay off your mortgage and lock the door at night but you will never escape dealing with the world. 

We’ve all been led to believe that our responsibility for what’s under our care stops at the kitchen drain.  You think that the government or some municipal department or the universe or some other entity is in charge of the place where all waste goes.  Nobody teaches you about drain etiquette.

The drain, I’ve learned, is connected to an unforgiving eco-system that while it sounds sort of simple and dorky can turn on you like a mad cobra. Everything that goes down either helps it or hurts it. Grease hurts it bad. Tempting as it is, you can’t pour all your bacon grease down the kitchen sink without eventual disaster.  And, guess what?  It’s your responsibility to keep the system in good health.  Otherwise you have to deal with the man in the t-shirt with that message.

No matter how much further up we arrive on the evolutionary ladder, how much faster we can download a file, how instantaneously we can connect by phone to China, our waste systems are still in the Middle Ages. In fact, they are worse because back then they used waste to enrich the fields.

This is some of the mind clutter I could leave behind if I would just sell the house and be done with it. If I sold the house, I would take the money, put it all in a big briefcase and sit on a park bench for a few hours without one other possession and then begin anew. No pictures of the kids when they were babies, no sentimental knickknacks, a clean new start.  Buy a toothbrush, buy a bowl, maybe a spoon.  When the old house next door to me sold they tore it down and built a big showy house.  The house across the street has been sold and rebuilt twice in the last five years.  In the current phase, they added another wing and a stone chimney and moved the entrance to the side.

I don’t know what my new wealthier neighbors are going to think about my dowdy little house.   It may become a blight on the neighborhood because of its size and vintage. I see the handwriting on the wall – and it doesn’t bode well for my lifestyle.  Maybe Yahoo will tell me what can be done.

On the e-book front August has been a very slow month.  Sales are way down except for Daughters and Nothing To Lose.  They continue to sell even though I haven't done a lick of marketing all summer.  Now here’s the thing about selling books on the internet:  things happen and you don’t know why.