Starting Up the College Search Process...Again

Two years ago, almost exactly at this time, my older daughter was trying to make her college decision. She was a senior in high school, and (I think) we had successfully navigated our first time college admissions process. She had a few choices, and then narrowed it down to two, where it stayed for some weeks before she ultimately decided, nearly at the last moment, and made her final choice.  I'm happy to report she loves her school, and for many reasons, it is the right place for her.

My younger daughter is now coming up behind her. She is a sophomore in high school, a good student, very active in clubs and activities.  Soon she will finish her sophomore year, and we're starting to talk about college.  There is something exciting about this -- though daunting, of course, at the idea of paying for another round of college -- to watch her beginning to make life decisions that will affect her forever.  It's fun to observe her thinking about it.

Yesterday when we got the 2014-15 school calendar, I told her if she wants to look at some colleges during fall or spring break, we can do that.  And in a few weeks, she'll be traveling to visit her sister at college for a few days to see what it's like, up close and personal.  Her sister's even scheduled a tour with other high school students so she can see what that's like.

We're trying to figure out when she can take her SATs next year. She's so busy that it's going to be difficult to find a time when she will have a few weeks to prep before taking them.  And Junior year, of course, can be overwhelming. It's the hardest year, academically, and she's choosing to take a heavy load.

I feel like I've learned a lot about the college admissions process since I went through it with my first daughter, and I hope we will make better, more informed choices this time around. Get ready, get set...a couple of challenging years ahead!

Going Best Seller on Amazon

Saturday started off much as any other day for me. I did my writing, read my email, played around online a little.  And checked my sales for The Opposite of Normal.

Friday I had done a promotion. I'd offered The Opposite of Normal free to anyone who wanted to download it to his or her Kindle.  I'd chosen the date about a week in advance and then sent my free download information to every ebook news outlet I could find, and there were a ton! All in all, I probably sent news of my free download to at least fifty or sixty outlets -- I never counted -- and then waited to see what would happen, fearing that nothing, in fact, would happen.

On Friday, thousands and thousands of people downloaded The Opposite of Normal for free. I was thrilled. I hoped that some of them would tell their friends this book was pretty good, or they would write a review, good or bad, or that they would somehow let me know what they thought of it.  That's where I thought the story would end.

But on Saturday morning, when the free promotion had ended and people had to buy again, I noticed that many, many people were actually buying The Opposite of Normal. And throughout the day, my numbers were not just creeping -- but flying -- upwards. By the end of the day, The Opposite of Normal was best selling in Jewish fiction, Jewish American Fiction, and Family Life Fiction. It also was very high in the overall Fiction category. Child of Mine (my first book) never got so high. (But, it, too feels the bump of The Opposite of Normal, and is being sold once again.)

Every time I logged on to see my number, I got a little nervous. What if it went lower? What if it didn't stay up there?  But indeed, it stayed nice and high all day. I sold more books on Saturday than I sold in the previous month, since The Opposite of Normal was first released.

Sunday things started sliding downward a bit, and since then, as well.  That's to be expected. But I'm still selling every day, and still I'm having quite good days.  Now I just have to hope that people will like it enough to tell someone else, to write a review, to reach out to me.  Ah, the life of an author...we write, we promote, we write, we promote....

That Cruel, Cruel SAT

Yesterday the SAT made the news. It's going to change formats (again) in 2016.  Too late for my kids -- one's in college now, and one will take her SATs next year -- but I paid attention anyway.

I have long felt the SAT to be an unfair test for incoming college students -- and not because I did so badly on it, which I did. (I will not tell you my SAT scores. This should give you an idea of the kind of hold the SAT puts on its test takers even decades later!)

To me, the SAT is not a test based in fairness. I happen to be able to afford the cost of SAT prep for my kids -- my older daughter took a class (at $600) for her prep. She felt it helped, though of course I don't know for sure because she never took the test without it. Still other kids in our very economically and socially diverse town can afford private tutors. Others can't afford anything and go in blind, or with just the ragged SAT prep books in the library.

I know a lot of very smart kids who do very well in school but not so great on their SATs. My older daughter graduated with above a 4.0 GPA, took Honors classes in a challenging school district, and has an incredible,  unmatched work ethic. She did okay but not probably where she should have been given her intelligence and focus.  I don't blame her for that. I blame the test.  Why are the reading passages so impossible? Why are the words ones we will never use in real life? Why is the math focused on math done, by many students, over two years previously? The College Board says it is fixing all of those things. Well, great. But I'm reserving my enthusiasm...because I'm not sure I believe they will be fixed enough.

Back to my daughter...

She wound up going to a very good college. They didn't care so much about SAT scores, seeing them for what they are. And I'm happy to say that two years after her acceptance (and now with a nearly perfect GPA in college), that more and more schools are putting less and less emphasis on this test, some getting rid of it entirely, others making it optional, others promising it will not make or break a decision.  I still see it being used to make scholarship decisions though, which makes me angry, and of course, many colleges still do have a minimum SAT they will take into consideration when making admissions decisions.  The SAT does not determine college ability or creativity or focus or drive.

Are we not putting enough pressure on our teens as it is? The college admissions process is already fraught with pressure most adults couldn't handle -- from taking as many Honors or AP classes -- as young as freshman year -- as possible, to making sure you're well rounded -- don't forget your sport, your clubs, your honor societies, your art or music endeavors, your volunteer work, your AP exams -- 4s and 5s only, please-- that I don't see we need an additional three hour test to decide whether the kids are worthy of admission to ANY college. Since the test has time and again shown to have problems, why do we keep doing it to them?

Who else wants to ban standardized testing -- SAT or ACT or ANY standardized testing -- from being a benchmark of the college admissions process?

The Hard Parts and The Easy Parts

Like many other jobs, being an author has its hard parts and its easy parts. One of the easy parts, at least last time with The Opposite of Normal, was writing the first draft. I pretty much sailed through that experience. (Unless I'm deluding myself and it was actually quite difficult and, like child birth and the resulting baby, the pain has been erased by the high of publication)

I'm working on my next book now, and I'm not having the same experience. Most mornings I've been dreading taking out the lap top to start.  I know what I want to do, though I'm not quite sure how I want to do it. My hands are not listening to me as I command the words to flow from my brain onto the screen.  I know where I want the book to go, but I keep wondering how I will get there.  This means that writing this time around is painful. Usually, for me, the first draft is the best part. It's the revisions that are horrendous.

I've heard other authors talk about this -- some books just flow and others don't -- so I know it's normal, but when they don't flow, frankly, it sucks.

When I'm into a first draft, I think about the characters all day. What are they going to do next? How will the plot go?  Who's going to get into trouble with stupid choices they make?  Imagine a bee buzzing around -- when the bee is many feet away and seemingly magically moving from one flower to the next to collect pollen, it's a nice scene that you can simply enjoy. But when the bee is loudly buzzing in your ear, annoying you, threatening you with a sting, your reaction is completely different. You want the noise, the pressure, the fear, to go away.

That's how I feel about this draft right now.  I want the bee to go away. Go back over there to the pretty garden so I don't have to hear your loud, insistent buzz.  Let me enjoy the nature scene from over here, where I sit with my book and my lemonade.

But the bee isn't listening. No, it isn't. It insists on buzzing in my ear, constantly, all day long. So I have no choice but to get the words down. Even if they are bad words. Even as I imagine having to rewrite entire scenes and chapters. Even as I wonder if I can carry off this complicated story, I am still writing the words. I sit down each morning and will the bee to buzz a little more quietly. So far, it hasn't.

When Boring Life Chore and Your Past Collide

Yesterday I brought my daughter's car to a NJ state inspection center. This doesn't sound like it would be worthy of a post, but hear me out.  There's a story in this.

I first started taking cars to NJ state inspection stations when I was a teenager. I had no idea what I was doing, of course. My first or second year, very early on, I had a terrible experience. One of the men running the inspection center was mean to me. He made fun of me for being clueless and he was gruff and frustrated, outwardly hostile when I messed up a procedure.

This has stuck with me, to this day, thirty years later. Every time I go to the inspection station, I get tense. I worry that I'll screw up. I worry that the guys there won't be nice. I worry that I'll mess up one of their seemingly specific directions.  So I make sure I have all the paperwork ready before I go. I try to be extra nice to the guys so they won't yell at me. And every time, it's no big deal. The guys are nice, or at the very worst, indifferent. (What a sucky job, really.)  The lines are never too long, and other motorists there for this annual boring chore chat with me about what I'm reading (as I always have a book with me) or about the weather.  It's over in half an hour, and the car always passes. (The kind of car I drove as a teenager didn't always pass, which embarrassed me. I would cringe as they put the fail sticker on, and then worry about how much it was going to cost to get fixed.)  So why do I still get all up in arms about this seemingly banal experience?

We remember the things that are painful to us, even if they're buried deeply, and in this case, when they're not buried deeply -- even if they are seemingly small or unimportant or we should know better to get over them.  We react based on those memories. I may be a 46 year old woman with a husband and two children to take care of, an adult who is an author and in control of her life, but I'm shaped by my experiences, some trivial, some not so much. Whether they come out in my writing -- as they sometimes do -- or they linger as a visceral reaction to something -- like tensing up before I go to the DMV -- they live on in me. Has anything like this ever happened to you? I'd love to hear.

On Tenacity

My younger daughter and I were talking about tenacity the other day. She's a sophomore in high school, recently turned 16, and she is one of the most tenacious people I know.  

I'm pretty sure tenacity is the quality people need in order to succeed in anything in life. It helps to be bright, yes. It helps to be quick witted and personable and all of those things. But tenacity. Tenacity will get you anywhere and everywhere.

I'm tenacious when it comes to certain things. I was tenacious in working towards having children, going through a whole lot of horrendous fertility treatments to get them. And definitely worth it. And I think I've worked tenaciously to get my books published. But tenacity as an overall quality -- no, I don't have that, not so much. I'm the woman you see reading in the corner, or talking to a friend at lunch. I'm the one who will always opt for an extra hour of sleep over pretty much anything else.

My daughter, though, she is the tenacious one.  She is tenacious in everything she does, from school work to performing in musicals to playing her cello to reading. She's tenacious in her friendships and in who she chooses to be her friends in the first place. She's tenacious in her conversation and in learning and in thinking. Everything she does, everything, is about tenacity.

Her tenacity doesn't always get her what she wants.  She has never been the star of the musical. She is not a straight A student. But it's the way she approaches life that makes me convinced she will be the one who gets it all in the end.  Because what she says she wants to do, she finds a way to do. And when she decides to do it, she does it until she no longer can.  She doesn't stop in the middle. She doesn't stop when someone else gets the better part or the better grade or a teacher (or, um, her mother) tells her she can't. She just does it.

So what do you think is the most important quality in order to be successful in life? I would love to hear.

Six Days!

Only six days left until The Opposite of Normal debuts! I'm very excited to share it with all of you.  It will be available on Kindle and as a paperback through Amazon.

This is my first independently published book.  Last time, my agent guided me through the process, and her literary agency did the publishing. This time, I've done it all myself. I hired my own editor, I worked with my own cover artist, I worked with a conversion company to convert my Word files to Kindle files, I did all my own publicity, marketing, everything. So it's all on me!

This is both good and bad news. The bad news is if you don't like it, if there are problems, if you can't access it on your Kindle, if the book doesn't come to you in the mail, if you don't like the writing, if you don't like the cover, if you find typos...it's all on me!  But the good news is that I made all my own decisions, that I've gained new skills, that I've made new author friends along the way....and it's been challenging, but fun. For someone who doesn't like change, who doesn't enjoy, but rather stresses at, learning new things, it's just a big accomplishment just to say I did it.

I chose to independently publish my book because I wanted control. I was a Production Editor in my former life -- meaning that I took a book from concept to bound book -- from just an idea that my publishing company wanted a book on X to finding someone to write it, to me doing all the editing on it, to helping our in house cover designer work on a cover, to marketing, to publicity...that was some fun stuff. I remembered those fun times when I worked on this book.

So get ready...get set....Write to me after you read it. I'd love to know what you think.