I was out with the kid today, doing a bunch of errands. We were driving on Wilson Mills Road, which is  a major east-west artery through Cleveland’s eastern suburbs, two lanes each way. The right-hand lane was moving painfully slowly. I didn’t see any school or other buses farther up the lane, but there we were, inching along at about 23 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone. I finally managed to get in the left lane and was able to increase my speed a bit, passing the slow-moving parade of cars on the right. At the head of the parade was an electric blue Ford, sublimely rolling along at 23 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone, driven by a tiny white-haired woman whose head was approximately level with the top of the steering wheel. And damned if she didn’t look dignified.

I’ve been working on a short story this week called The Heebie Jeebie Girl. It’s partially based one of my cousins, who for a time when she was very young, correctly gave the daily lottery number to my aunt and grandmother. I learned years later that our great uncle called her The Heebie Jeebie Girl. A lot of my stories (and I would venture that of many writers) are based on events from my life or those of someone I know.  The discovery process of the writing comes in augmenting history–saying, “Okay, A and B is what actually happened. But what if C and D happened next? Or D happened before B?” Real life is just the place where the writer jumps off.

This story–the story my cousin might tell you–has an O. Henryesque ending, but I don’t think that ending will translate into a short story. It’s a funny ending in some ways, but it doesn’t have enough weight. I’m at the point where the characters and the story are starting to break away from the actual events (at least the events as I know them). The stories we tell about our lives and the stories our relatives and friends tell about the same events frequently diverge. We are all storytellers.

Just for kicks, here’s the first 500 words or so of The Heebie Jeebie Girl. Bear in mind that this is a first draft. I may post subsequent drafts in the future just because it might be fun to track the evolution of a story:

I never saw any of the money my sister or my niece won playing the daily number. I could have cashed in too, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem right, even though Hope gave the first number to me.

She was only about six then, and she was sitting out in the garage with me one Saturday while I worked on Ralph Krasniak’s ’74 Charger, which he needed to get to work at the Sheet and Tube on Monday. My sister, Dolores, doesn’t like me to work on Sundays because it’s the Lord’s Day, so I had to get it all rebuilt in one day. Ralph’s one of the few guys in the neighborhood who hasn’t been laid off by the mill yet, so he can at least pay you when he says he’s going to. He needed a car, and I needed the money.

Little Hope sat out in the garage with me and watched as I rebuilt the carburetor. Those old Chargers are so finicky that they can’t run right unless it’s 72 degrees, dry, and sunny. It was a humid summer that had turned into a wet fall. Ralph was stalling out left and right, and I was tired of having him stop by every other day asking me to tinker with the choke setting or the float level. I kept doing it for free since he drives three other guys in the neighborhood to work too, and they’ll all lose their jobs if the car doesn’t run. But I finally reached my breaking point and rebuilt the darn thing.

Hope is smart as a whip and kept asking me questions about the engine and could name half the parts by the end of the afternoon. At one point, she was holding the hi and lo screws, one in each hand, and moving them up and down like they were soldiers in a parade. Then she suddenly looked up at me and said, “Want to hear a secret?”

“Sure,” I said. I kept one eye on her and one eye on the bowl in my hand.

“The daily number is going to be 126,” she said. She has wispy blond hair that’s always hanging in front of her eyes, but as she said this, she actually tucked her hair behind her ears so she could look at me a little better. “You should go to Morten’s and play it. It’s going to win.”

“Since when does a little girl know about playing the lottery?”

“Grandma plays it.”

“My sister wastes her money. She’d be better off putting it in the bank instead of hiding what little money she has in a cigar box.”

“Why does she hide her money in a cigar box?”

“Because she doesn’t trust the bank.”

“Why not?”

“Because fifty years ago all the rich guys running the country overspent and the stock market crashed, then everybody pulled all their money from the banks and all the banks crashed and people lost lots of money.”

“That was the Depression, right?”

“Right.”

“Grandma talks about it all the time. She said everybody was poor then.”

“They were,” I said as I grabbed the venturi.

“Well if you play 126, you’ll win and then you’ll have money,” she said and sounded so confident and grown up that the part almost slipped out of my hand.

When I was in junior high, I used to make these elaborate schedules for myself during summer vacation. I would try to plan, hour by hour, what I would do so I would get as much as possible accomplished. They’d look something like this:

7:00 a.m.  Work out
8:00 a.m.  Walk the dog
8:30 a.m.  Eat breakfast
9:00 a.m.  Study German (I tried to teach myself German one summer. I was doing well until the book I had switched to Old German script in about chapter nine)
10:00 a.m.  Read
12:00 p.m.  Lunch
12:30 p.m.  Go for a bike ride
2:00 p.m.  Study French (Learned to read some basic French but  have a horrendous accent)
3:00 p.m.  Write
6:00 p.m.  Eat dinner
7:00 p.m.  Read or write (I thought I was being generous by giving myself a choice)

I would stick to this schedule for about four days before I started staying up late to watch David Letterman, sleeping in, working on my tan, hanging with friends, and doing whatever else it is a nerdy 13-year-old girl does. Now that I’m unemployed, I’ve toyed with the idea of making a schedule again, but it seemed a little too OCD. Then I saw this great article on The99Percent.com on manifestos for art, business, and life. I was particularly taken with Leo Tolstoy’s Ten Rules for Life, which he reportedly wrote when he was 18. Number 5 on his list reads: “Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.”

Having a manifesto sounds a lot cooler than having a schedule.

This is the first post of the new website.  I hope to use this blog to talk about books, baseball, bicycles (so many of the things I love start with the letter “B;” what’s that about?). As I write this, I’m listening to the sound of a no-holds-barred April thunderstorm outside my window, making this a fine day to sit inside and write. This is the first day that I’m officially without a job. I was laid off last week from a job I really loved with a nonprofit organization that moved its headquarters. I’m feeling oddly hopeful about my unemployment. Being without a job definitely provides one with more time to write, but there’s also a self-imposed feeling of urgency, that I need to get many things done around the house in order to justify being home all day.

Like most writers, I’d love to earn my living by selling my fiction. More and more people are making money off their work by selling e-books. I don’t know how many are making a living. For every Amanda Hocking or J.A. Konrath, there are dozens of writers who haven’t had a download in a month. It seems that the most successful e-book authors write genre fiction. Is there a market for literary fiction online? I guess that’s what I hope to find out.

Muse, the literary journal of The LIT, has published my short story “What Aunt Lizzie Saw.” I’m delighted to be in this issue–there is some great writing in here. The note by editor Judith Mansour is brief but biting. I also really like Eric Anderson’s “The People Next Door Are Pig People.” (Not sure if it’s a poem or a prose poem, but I like it.)

I’m very pleased to say that my short story, “Monster Jones Wants to Creep You Out,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editor of Conclave: A Journal of Character. Conclave is an annual literary journal based out of Chicago and features, fiction, poetry, and photography. I’m flattered that its editor chose my story as one of six possible nominations from the journal. Read more about Conclave here.

I have an article in this week’s issue of Cool Cleveland. The article is a follow-up to a piece I did a few months ago on the closing of St. Peter Church. And be sure to catch Cool Cleveland next week for an interview I did with Mike Petrone (yes, my brother) on his 30 years as a musician in Cleveland and a benefit concert he’s doing for the Cleveland School of the Arts on November 20.

Loganberry Books will once again be hosting Author Alley during the Larchmere Flea Market. It takes place Saturday, July 3 from 12-4. I’ll be one of 40+ local authors there. I’m looking forward to seeing friends like Peter Chakerian, Sarah Willis, Janie Reinhart, and Gail Bellamy along with lots of new people. Please stop by and check out some great fiction and non-fiction by northeast Ohio writers. And the Larchmere Flea Market is pretty cool too. And if you’re like my friend Peter and don’t really like paper, you can now read A Body at Rest as an e-book (Kindle format).

A Body at Rest has won a bronze medal for best regional fiction (Great Lakes region) in the Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY Awards. I wasn’t able to attend the awards ceremony in NYC on May 25, but my friend Christine Whitley (who just won the Woodward/Newman Drama Prize) attended in my stead and mailed the award packet to me. I confess to putting on the (very heavy) bronze medal and walking around the house shouting “It’s a major award!” (a la A Christmas Story) for nearly an hour. Somehow, my husband and child have not left me.

And now you can read A Body at Rest on your Kindle! Assuming you own a Kindle… It’s bargain priced at $4.99. Why not give a new author a try?

A Body at Rest has been named a finalist in the Great Lakes Fiction Category in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. This is the 14th annual competition held by Independent Publisher Online. This year they received something like 2,000 entries. The finalists include a large number of university and small presses (and a couple bigger small presses). I’m quite happy that the book is getting some recognition. Winners will be announced by May 18 and honored at an event in NYC on May 25 (coinciding with but not part of Book Expo). I’ll keep you posted.