It seems to be the thing to do this time of year to say “ok bai” to the year that’s slipped behind us and “oh hai” to the one that just popped up on the horizon.

ok bai 2007

I had some of my worst and best moments in 2007. Most of them can’t pass the privacy filter and so won’t show up here. But I shall mention some biggies:

My twin girls were born:

And my book was finished:

Mouse over this or click it to see the book cover.

Everything changed in 2007. 2007 was quite a year, as years go. See ya, 2007, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

oh hai 2008

2008 will comprise:

• watching the babies grow into pre-toddlers
• trying to guess all the ways in which they might damage themselves with everyday objects as they master the high arts of scooting and crawling
• writing book two of the Kaimira series, and working on content for kaimiracode.com
• doing some work on a new property (very different from Kaimira)
• getting better acquainted with my muse

Everything will change again in 2008. I have no idea what will happen, what it will be like, or how to prepare. Let it come.

Tags: 2007, 2008, babies, bai, hai, kaimira, muse, twins

Today the twins are three months old. I’ve been meaning to write something about the experience of them, but in the jumble of clichés and Frequently Asked Questions, the friendly advice and expert articles, and the straight lack of time to let thoughts settle, I’ve been unable to focus on what this whole thing has really been like.

No one reads this blog but Izzy and Joi, and sometimes my mom, so it’s a good place to take a stab at writing about it.

Here’s what I think it’s like:

It’s like a cross between having a very, very dearly beloved pet, and hosting a very tiny, elderly foreign man. Times two.

Beloved pet. You know how, when you have a pet you are really attached to, you just can’t wait to get home and see them? It’s sort of like that, but stronger. Whatever bigness and greatness you may have accomplished that day at the coal mines, it’s nowhere near as rewarding as making a baby smile. They are smiling now, and it doesn’t take much to make it happen. And it’s the coolest thing in the world when it does. Every time. It doesn’t get old.

Tiny. They were born about half the size of regular babies, and they’ve only recently become normalish sized. But a normal sized baby still makes for a very tiny foreign gentleman.

Elderly men. Complete with multiple chins and male pattern baldness. I don’t think they’re going to start looking like little girls until their baby hair falls off and they grow some little girl hair. Don’t get me wrong… they are cute. But in that miniature elderly gentleman sort of way.

Foreign. They don’t speak English, and they don’t seem to understand anything we say to them, though they do often grin politely while we’re talking to them. But as their hosts, we are obliged to decipher their needs. We want their stay to be a pleasant one, and so the burden of communication falls on our shoulders.

I imagine some sort of stork-run baby exchange program, and that my babies are in some foreign land, confounding their host family with strange noises and gestures that I would be able to understand completely.

My secret agenda has been for their first word to be aaarrgh! (with an optional “shiver me timbers”), complete with one eye closed and ugly pirate face. They’ve got the face down when they work it, but the noise they make needs practice. But in the past couple of weeks I’ve decided I should get serious, so I’m throwing in the occasional bit of Middle English, Chinese, and Klingon.

That’s a joke. The Klingon part, anyway.

Tags: babies, being a father, chinese, cuteness, kids, klingon, middle english, parenting, twins

Today I got the hiccups. That was pretty cool. I can see how it might get old after a while, but right now it’s all new.

Tags: babies, blogging, hiccups

Disclaimer: My blog posts may lean a little to the baby side for a few weeks.

5. Cliché. A writer is generally supposed to avoid cliché characters, but raising a baby seems to be a shroud of deliberate rituals. You want to give your detective some sort of quirk (a funny limp, a cute psychiatric anxiety disorder, or even a heart-warming addiction to over-the-counter medication) to make him stand out in the motley crowd of fictional detectives, but your baby you just want to be unabashedly stereotypical–fat and happy.

4. Character Arc. You have at least a vague idea of who your character will become when you start out. She starts out shy yet sassy, but after 250 pages of trials and tribulations, she has become confident and sassy. Your babies, you can only toss wild guesses as to who they will become.

3. Conflict. Conflict is drama, they say. You want your characters to face painful obstacles. You want them to suffer, so their triumphs will taste all the sweeter. Your babies, you want their lives to be smooth as a gosling’s butt.

2. Poop. Fictional characters don’t poop, usually. Not on the page. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part you don’t get into that part of your characters’ lives. It turns out that babies, on the other hand, are about very little else.

1. Kill your babies, they say about writing. But please, not literally.

Tags: babies, baby tips, character arc, characters, cliché, conflict, kill your babies, poop, writing tips

It turns out that naming babies is not much at all like naming characters.

And by “naming babies” I don’t mean naming other people’s babies. I saw a baby once that looked like a Donald Trump puppet, and she would have been fairly easy to name. Trumpet, I was thinking at the time.

No, I mean naming one’s own babies.

When I set about naming a character, I generally have a good idea of the weight that character has to carry on his or her shoulders. I know the character arc, more or less. I know the personality quirks. I know the character in four dimensions, in 3D space as well as across time.

It’s not the same with babies. You can only guess at their personalities. You can only take a wild stab at who they might become. And you don’t want to place appropriate burdens on their shoulders.

So you read endless lists of names, ranging from boring to insane. You read in index of a book on mythology, and decide you don’t want your child to have the name of a car model. You flip through the dictionary, hoping to find that one perfect word that nobody else has thought to use as a name, but only because they weren’t lucky enough to open to that page. But instead, you land on words like intrepid and antebellum.

I wrote a story once called Carter the Farter. This is the second paragraph:

What happened was this: right in the middle of a Friday math quiz, during such a hush that Carter could feel the third-grade teacher staring from her desk, and he could hear the wringing of brains for answers and feel the scratch of pencils, and the occasional coughs and sneezes and sniffles rang like claps of thunder, each drawing the attention of the class, desperately thirsty for any kind of diversion — at this moment, as the clock inched its way to ten, Carter let out one of the biggest farts of his life.

Carter’s name isn’t bad, but it is unfortunate. His last name, Rucker, will likely get him into trouble two or three down the line, but that’s another story, one that won’t be written.

The story is about names and our relationship to them. When coming up with names for babies, we try not to make them bully targets. We try not to give them names that carry too much baggage. We try to give them a name they can own and shape to fit their own evolving characters.

It’s a tough job. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Tags: babies, baby names, naming babies