I then proceeded to cook a meal made of…guess what? Beans and pasta. But it was a big hit. Everyone, including my youngest, had at least three bowls.

Here’s the recipe for Anjali’s “Giving In” Soup–

Soak about 1.5 pounds of WHITE NAVY BEANS the night before. Don’t do cannellini beans, because they take too long to soften, and children will be crying and killing each other the next day when dinner is an hour late because those damn cannellini beans take forever to soften.

Fill an enormous pot with water. Leave 3-4 inches of space at the top. Dice up a crap-load of celery–five, six, seven stalks at least. Celery is my most important ingredient for a good veggie broth.

Then, add several tablespoons of minced or chopped GARLIC. You can’t go wrong with garlic. So add some more.

Chop up more scallions than you can possibly imagine. Why? see GARLIC.

Cut up a bunch of carrots in nice round circles, because kids like the carrots in nice round circles.

Cut up a package of either tempeh or extra firm tofu. Both are equally wonderful. I used tempeh this time around.

Dice only half a yellow onion, because by now you’re just too damn tired to do any more chopping.

(I didn’t have fresh parsley on hand. If I did, I would have chopped some parsley as well.)

Dump everything into the pot, season with Eden’s Sea Salt (possibly the best salt in the universe). Put to boil, and cover with a lid. When the beans are soft, add 3/4 of a box of whatever cutesy little pasta you find at the store. I found some cavatelli– adorable tiny pasta shells.

Cook for 10 more minutes until the pasta is al dente.

Serve in deep bowls, because everyone will scarf this down. Sprinkle with parmesan.

Then figure out tomorrow night’s dinner, because there won’t be any leftovers.

This is confusing the hell out of her.

She’s creating snowflakes out of tissue paper, building snowmen with cotton balls, learning about the arctic, penguins, and polar bears. She’s coloring pictures of hats and gloves and scarves. She’s learning about the months of winter (December, January & February).

And when she comes home from school, she’s going outside wearing nothing but a long sleeve shirt and sneakers.

It’s nippy in the mornings and the evenings, but in the middle of the day, it’s like spring. We are outside most days, using sidewalk chalk, riding bikes, blowing bubbles.

The other day, while reading on the porch, I swatted away a bee. Things are blooming. Blooming!

Where did our winter go?

*  *  *  *  *

I’m 70 pages in, and pretty soon I’m going to have to stop writing and do some research.

I’m a lazy writer. The thought of doing research makes me want to stop writing. With Secrets, I hardly had to do any research. With Finding Om, I’m going to have to have a fairly decent understanding of bone marrow transplants. And I’m going to need to do a little, very specific research about the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947.

Does that get you curious? Does the novel sound interesting? Bueller? Bueller?

*  *  *  *  *  *

I’d had a Pinterest invitation sitting in my Facebook Inbox for days, and had no idea what to do with it.

Finally, I joined, and I still don’t know what to do with it. You pin things? Like a bulletin board? And people follow you…like Twitter? (I still don’t really know what to do with Twitter.) And are we “friends” on Pinterest, like Facebook? Am I supposed to pin things from a website? And then other people see my pin? What’s the difference between pinning something and “liking” something?

Back in the day, I was blogging when hardly anyone was blogging and I felt so ahead of the game.

Now I can’t seem to ever catch up.

When I finished my first draft of Secrets of the Sari Chest, I was so impressed with myself simply because I wrote so! many! pages! about the same story. Though I could never write a novel like To Kill A Mockingbird, I kind of get why Harper Lee stopped after just one book. She probably used all of her best ideas for one story, and couldn’t come up with any more.

In the past week of writing Finding Om, I find myself starting a new scene and realizing — oops– I’ve written that same scene in Secrets just with different characters. I’m beginning to wonder if I can write a second novel at all without plagiarizing myself.

Still, I’m 63 pages in, and far enough to feel confident that I will at least get through the first draft.

*  *  *  *  *

Speaking of repeating my best ideas– I’ve been feeling similarly with respect to dinner around here. I think I’ve been cooking the same recipes for so long, they all look exactly the same to me. For instance, I think 90% of the time we’re eating a dish that’s either bean based or pasta based. (If I had my way, I’d eat more meals that were potato based. But alas, potatoes are one of the few vegetables my kids are picky about.)

I found this soup recipe a while back. It looks delicious, doesn’t it? But now I’m wondering– Do I really need to introduce another pasta/bean dish to our repetroire? Don’t get me wrong…I have a quiche in the oven right now, and I make a mean vegetarian schnitzel. We do have some dishes that mix it up. Just not a ton.

Is it because I’m a vegetarian that I feel this way? Or do you meat eaters out there also feel like you tend to eat very similar dishes every night?

I did it for the last time yesterday. I won’t do it anymore. But for the past couple of months, I just wanted to experience how good it feels to drive.

At intersections, I get looks because I blast my Bose sound system with the moon roof open. Passengers in other cars pulling up next to me do a double take. Isn’t she too old to be playing music that loudly? They wonder. Is that a car seat she has in the back?

The three preschoolers I take five mornings a week to school, with their car seats and booster seats, are now used to the moon roof and the loud music. The two sisters I drive ask me, once in a while, “Auntie, what happened to your red car? The one that looks like Mommy’s car?”

“I don’t have it anymore,” I explain. “I traded it in.”

The eldest of the bunch crunches her nose up. She feels slightly betrayed that I could make such a big change without consulting her first.

The first few weeks after I got the car, my 10-year said– “I keep looking for the minivan when we come out to the parking lot. I keep forgetting we don’t have it anymore.”

“Really?” I’d say. “I’ve never once looked for the minivan.” Because once I got rid of it, I swear, it’s like I never even had one. I barely remember what it was like to drive it. My gym parking lot has about a million red Toyota Siennas. When I see them as I come out of yoga, I feel about as attached to them as I do a bulldozer.

My male friends shake their heads at me. “Why would you get rid of your minivan? It was such a great car.” I roll my eyes. Their wives drive their minivans. They drive their sports cars or their more masculine SUVs. They would never drive a minivan full time.

I worried that my parents, who visit regularly, wouldn’t feel comfortable with all seven of us crammed in the car. “It’s fine,” they said. “This car should be about you, not about us.”

When my kids aren’t looking, I remove the magnet on the back that proudly declares the name of their elementary school. They find it in the garage, later, among heaps of tools. “How did this come off the car?” They ask me. I shrug my shoulders, fake cluelessness. The truth, is that as much pride as I have in their elementary school, this car is my car. The minivan was their car.

This car is about me.

On Christmas Eve, we traded my minivan in for a Mazda CX-9. It is black, the only color I have ever found acceptable for cars. When I saw it in the showroom, it already had a red bow on it. It looked so similar to the Saab I drove for thirteen years, that I told my husband I thought my Saab had been reincarnated.

I didn’t even look back at our minivan when we pulled out of the parking lot. Our last baby came home from the hospital in that minivan. You would think I could have mustered some sentimentality for it– but I couldn’t.

My husband– who is one of the only people (aside from my father) who understands how much I love driving, who gets that I have relationships with my cars– said, “You know, you are you in this car.”

“I know,” I said. Because he was right.

Some people are what they eat. I am what I drive.

Now, the house is quiet.

In two hours, three children will traipse through the door with all of their demands. Laundry calls to me from upstairs. I have to figure out dinner. I have to call the piano tuner. I should get the mail. See what bills need to be paid.

The couch beckons with its cushiony surface. “Come nap on me,” it says. “Step away from the novel. Come, sit back, relax, stay awhile.”

I reach for a glass of water, push my sit bones deeper into the chair.

“I must write my two pages,” I tell myself. “I must right them now, quickly, before my entire afternoon devolves into chaos.”

My lids grow heavy. I want to lay my head down. But I won’t.

My writing partner, Soniah, linked to an inspiring post by writer Alexander Chee. The quote I leave you with from Chee’s blog post is not just for writers. It’s for everyone.

I recently had lunch with the AAWW interns, and one of them asked me, “What do you think, having taught writers for a while, is the thing that makes the big difference? What separates the students who go on to become writers from the students who don’t?”

“Stamina,” I said, very quickly. Persistence is the gift that brings all the others. I know many writers with a great deal of talent who do not write. Art is not fair, it is not democratic, it has no court of appeals. Talent is not equally apportioned, but luckily it also doesn’t matter as much as stamina. There is little science to it all that is reliable except that I have seen persistence carry the day over talent again and again. And it may be this that inspires me most of all.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, filled with the best kind of stamina.

Part of the reason why I think I’ll be so sad if I never get a book published, is because I think publishing a novel would be a great way to thank all of these wonderful people who support me day after day. So many writers have to hide their writing from others, have to fight for every minute in front of the laptop. I’m so, so lucky I don’t have to do this. I’m so, so lucky, that when I have such terrible doubts about my ability as a writer, about my chance of getting a book published, that the only person working against me is me.

I just have to remind myself of this. Unlike working at a job away from home, I have to be the one to pat myself on my back. No one will be there to do it for me. I have to remind myself that writing IS work. Publication or not, it is work that counts.

page 45, novel #2

And so, I celebrate the work by taking photos of the page I’m on, to chart my own milestones, my own progress, since I don’t have a manager or a paycheck.

Serve with a dash of soy and a side of chopsticks!

I don’t know how it’s possible, but I’ve never cooked Chinese food before. (Unless you include instant Ramen noodles, which I don’t.) I absolutely love Chinese food. But when I’m in the mood for spring rolls, instead of cooking, I run off to one of my three favorite Chinese restaurants, all within a few miles of my house.

But yesterday, in honor of Chinese New Year, I decided to cook Chinese. Over the weekend, my husband  picked up whole wheat lo mein noodles and hoisin sauce. I sauteed the vegetables we happened to have in the house– green peas, grated carrots, diced green onions, and garlic. I cubed extra firm tofu, tossed in the already cooked noodles, and threw in a few tablespoons of hoisin sauce. Voila! Year of the Dragon Noodles. The kids loved it, and I’ve finally made my Chinese friends proud.

First, some background. I’ve never been much of an “outliner.” I know some writers of novels/screenplays/plays who complete all of their research and a 50-100 page outline before they write a single word. If I had to invest that much into a novel before doing any writing, I’d never have finished Secrets of the Sari Chest.

And yet, I wasn’t too keen on my writing process with Secrets. Though I had a pretty good idea of the story beforehand, my plot was all over the place. After several drafts, I changed the age of the protagonist, which threw off a good bit of the novel. I cut out an entire character. I brought in a character who previously only appeared in a flashback. Sure, every novel is revised a gazillion times before it’s ready. But I had 200+ extra pages that I didn’t even use in the novel because I wrote in such a disorganized fashion.

I didn’t want to repeat this incredibly inefficient method again with my second novel.

My character web

In December, the wonderful Terra Elan McVoy told the Club that she does a Character Web and a Timeline for her novels. The Character Web shows the relationships between all the characters. The timeline is just that– dates and times for all pertinent events in the plot. I rushed home from this meeting and immediately started creating them for Finding Om. Though Character Webs and Timelines requires a lot of forethought, I find them far easier to manage than doing a detailed, scene-to-scene, chapter-to-chapter outline.

Thanks to Terra, I now have a completed character web and a timeline for Finding Om.

Jeff Stepakoff was our wonderful speaker yesterday. He has written for Dawson’s Creek and other television shows, and is now out with his second novel, The Orchard. (I started The Orchard last night and so far I love it.) There is much to be learned from screenplay writers, that’s for sure. Jeff educated us on how one measures a television show or movie with Acts and Scenes and Beats– and how these measurements are imperative for good fiction writing.

But what I really took home from Jeff, was the importance of writing your book jacket before you write your novel. Book jackets have compelling “hooks” which try to get potential readers from the bookshelf in a bookstore to the cash register. I’ve spent most of this morning working on my book jacket for Finding Om. I’m hoping that the Book Jacket will keep me focused on the plot, keep me writing scenes that push the plot forward, and prevent me from writing gobs of back story (which I did i the first several drafts of Secrets.)

So, there you have it. Great tips from great author-speakers. Hope you writers out there find them helpful!

I’m a realist. It is what it is. C’est la vie. If something is kinda shitty, I’m not going to pretend that it’s not. If I’m stressed out, you’re going to hear about it– I’m not going to cheerily announce “oh, it could be worse.” If I’m frustrated about something, I’m not going to fake it.

Hence my blog post from two days ago. I needed to get it out.

Soon after I wrote the post, I got some lovely comments. Oh, they were beyond lovely. So incredibly encouraging.

And so, after reading them, I thought: If these amazing people can take the time out of their busy lives to write such thoughtful, encouraging words, the least I can do is write a few words on my next novel.

That night, I opened up my word document with twenty or so pages of my next novel, Finding Om. I hadn’t worked on that novel in over two months.

I took a deep breath.

I wrote two pages.

Yesterday, I wrote three more.

And so, after one incredibly negative post, came something positive. I’m working on my next novel again. I don’t know for how long, but at least I’m doing it. The act of telling the truth has liberated me from some of the anxiety. It’s just words on a page, but when you’re a writer, words on a page are everything.

So thank you.