Musings on Becoming a Grandma (and a writer)

And an unexpected meeting with a Big Five editor

The Cycle of Life and the Risk I Took to Have Children

I’ll give you the absolute best news first; I am a grandmother! A baby girl named Maisy has captured my heart. In time, I’ll figure out how to express that sentiment without using a cliché. But not today. As I write this, I’m sitting on a comfy sofa and watching dad (my son) and mom ogling at Maisy. I’m treasuring the cycle of life.

Caressing my granddaughter is bittersweet. My current husband, Mike, already a dedicated “Grampy” and a former elementary school counselor, has an amazing way with children. I cannot wait for him to meet her. Yet Maisy will never meet her biological grandfather, my late husband, Dave. Instead, I imagine Dave dancing around the living room with her in his arms, holding her on his hip during excursions to the library, and showing her off to his friends – just as he did with our boys.

Life is full of risks, and I could have – some say should have – chosen not to have children with an HIV-positive man. I write about the complexity of that choice in my memoir (a situation faced by thousands of wives and partners of men with hemophilia), but I will leave you with this: I am glad I took the risk.

Daddy and Maisy, twelve days old – (photo of Grandma below)

My Upcoming Meeting with a Big Five Editor

In November, I attended the Miami Book Fair. Mike and I had planned to stay the weekend, but he had an unexpected complication after cervical spine surgery that kept him in the hospital for four weeks. He insisted I still attend, although I did cut the weekend short. (I met amazing authors that I plan to highlight in the coming months.) In the evening, I attended a fundraiser for the fair (which is free for the public) and bid on a silent auction item. An editor of a Big Five publishing house was offering to read fifty pages of an aspiring writer’s work with a follow-up zoom call. Well damn, I won!

My manuscript was already in the hands of a developmental editor (the wonderful Katie Bannon), and we have a meeting to discuss it next month. Still, I knew the first fifty pages needed polishing, especially with line edits. I was saving those for after the developmental edit. (There’s no need to polish lines if they don’t make it in the manuscript.) Thus began a cycle of editing the fifty pages, printing a hard copy, reading the pages out loud, inputting the new edits, using an AI reader to recite the fifty pages to me. I cycled through the process multiple times until my December 23 deadline. At some point, Mike read a draft, too. One word sums up the process: TEDIOUS.

Here’s a tip for editing that I finally figured out after finding mistakes in my new changes, such as typos and copy and paste errors: Read your new lines out loud, along with surrounding sentences or paragraphs to catch the new mistakes. That helped.

As for the feedback from the editor, a younger me would be more nervous, less confident, and more obsessed with the imperfections that still exist. It’s not that I’m confident the editor will love my work (she may not), but I’m confident I will learn from the experience and receive worthy advice on how to tell a story that will attract an audience. For the writers out there, I promise to share the feedback in case the advice resonates with you.

I did my diligent Internet search on the editor and I’m thrilled to meet her. I read the titles she has worked on, watched interviews with her on YouTube, and found a moving essay she wrote about being an editor. Her passion and compassion shined through my discoveries – and I’m loving that her bio says she is an “advocate for multicultural and women’s voices.” So stay tuned for more.

World AIDS Day

Finally, I’d like to make a belated World AIDS Day tribute to Dave. It’s hard to believe he’s been gone for twenty-seven years. Dave is the reason I’ve taken up writing and tackled my memoir – a love story complicated by a pharmaceutical scandal. For those who are new to my Substack, Dave contracted HIV from an FDA-approved blood clotting medication. But for today, along with all the lives lost to HIV and AIDS, I celebrate Dave’s short life and take pride in his life as a father, husband, and special education teacher. He lives on in our children and now his granddaughter, Maisy.

Upcoming writing events I’m excited about

January 8: The Magic of Micro Prose, a virtual Craft Talks webinar with Darien Hsu Gee on how to write a story with 300 words or fewer. Craft Talks webinars, curated by Sharla Yates and Allison K. Williams, are affordable and this one is still priced at $15.00 for the early bird registration! Otherwise, it is $25.00.

February 1 & 2: The Deep Dive Virtual Retreat with the podcasts hosts of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. Join Bianca Marais, Carly Watters, and CeCe Lyra with an all-star lineup of twelve presenters, including authors, editors, and agents! The series runs 10 am to 5pm each day.

June 4 thru 10: The Writer’s Hotel “Mini MFA” for fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. This in-person conference, run by Shanna McNair and Scott Wolven, will be at the Sebasco Harbor Resort in Phippsburg, Maine. The lineup includes Lidia Yuknavitch, poet Richard Blanco, and Elyssa East. What I love about this conference is the quality of the speakers and the intimacy of the sessions, the evening author and attendee readings, the agent pitch sessions, and Shanna’s and Scott’s dedication to nurturing writers. I’ve attended the virtual event twice. Two years ago, I was Meghan Daum’s teaching assistant, and this year, I will be a directors’ assistant for nonfiction.

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Happy New Year and thank you for making it to the end!

Cheers,

Kathy

Grandma and Maisy