Lara Zielin

When I was a high school freshman, I played on the tennis team. I was terrible. I was certainly one of the most inexperienced players out there, and I lost every game I played. I remember thinking at the time, “I should have started this sport in junior high. THEN I’d be a good player.” I didn’t play on the team the next year.

I’ve been at writers’ conferences where the same thing has happened. Not tennis — I mean, this feeling, when everyone shows their pages and I look at the other writing in the room and I think, “If I’d started getting serious about this sooner, I’d be okay right now. Everyone else smokes me.”

Except, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? That we don’t start out perfect, but that we inch toward being better. That we do it when we’re not awesome so that one day we can be sort of awesome. Or really awesome if we’re lucky.

I hear this a lot at the place where I work out and where, now, I teach indoor cycling classes. “I’d come but I’m afraid I’ll look stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Dude. You know what? We all look stupid. And we all didn’t start out knowing what we were doing.

So, here’s a picture I both love and hate, and it illustrates what I’m talking about. It was taken at Elvis Fest in Ypsilanti last year. And I remember I saw it and I was like, “THAT’S how big my arms are? That’s what I look like from the side? Uuuggh, kill me now.” (Okay, but I also love the photo because, hello, hilarious Blues Brothers impersonators and, um, is that tattooed Elvis or something? Who is that guy? This photo cracks me up and horrifies me all at once.)

I love and hate this photo. Blues Brothers and tattooed Elivs? Yay! My body from the side? Less than yay.

The point is, the body in that photo above didn’t look awesome on an indoor cycling bike. Or running down the street. Or whatever. My body STILL doesn’t look awesome doing those things all the time. Better, sure, but I’m not THAT different than I was in the picture above. Ten pounds, maybe. But I feel different. And if I don’t do this stuff when I’m not awesome, then I can’t get to … anything better. It’s something I’ve learned about exercise and writing — two of my fave topics evvaaarr — but it applies to everything, I think.

Do it when you suck. When you look fat with Elvis. When you’ve gotten a thousand query rejections but you keep on writing anyhow.

Just so you don’t stay in the same place.

Uhthankyouvaaarmuch. Elvis has left the building.

Authors Margaret Yang and Harry Campion create fast-paced, techno-centric worlds in their science fiction — a genre I rarely read but, hey, when it’s THIS good, you gotta crack that spine (or download it, as the case may be).

Their second book, ‘The Caline Conspiracy,’ just came out last week and I really wanted them to stop by to talk about it. In the amazing world they’ve created, calines are the perfect pets — like dogs, but no shedding or eating the trash. But one caline, Madeline, is suspected of murder, and private investigator Aidra Scot must look into it. I invited them over to talk about their new novel as well as their writing process. Because they write … together! Under the single name, M.H. Mead. It boggles the mind. But, here — enough from me. Let them explain. Take it away, Margaret and Harry!

Q: Calines sound amazing (I totally want one!) but I’m curious if they’ve replaced regular dogs in your book? My dog Amos specifically wanted me to ask if beagles still exist, or if calines were so superior to regular dogs that they’ve replaced them?

Calines are both rare and expensive. Moreover, they can’t be bred, they can only be manufactured. So, calines are toys for the very rich. Dogs certainly still exist, and are the lovable human companions they’ve always been. In fact, one of our characters has a full-time job training calines, and he’s also a dog-breeder on the side.

Tell Amos not to worry! A dog like him is irreplaceable.

Q: You guys co-author novels, which I think is so incredible. If I had to work with someone, I’d probably stick a fork in their eyeballs. So, how do you guys make it work? What are one or two things you do to keep your working relationship strong and your writing fresh?

Somehow, authors Margaret Yang and Harry Campion can write books together and not stab each other's eyeballs out. Their latest book is called 'The Caline Conspiracy.'

It helps that we share a brain. We finish each other’s sentences even when we’re not writing together. We also share a sense of humor. We laugh a lot more than we argue.

We get really, really chatty when we’re writing in the same room. We used to feel guilty about it, like, “Oh, we should be putting words on the page, not talking about Firefly or our latest people-watching expedition to Starbucks.” But we’ve come to realize it’s part of our process. Somehow, sharing these stories that have nothing to do with work makes the work better. Fortunately, most of our writing takes place in separate rooms, in separate houses, in separate cities, since Harry lives in Detroit and Margaret lives in Ann Arbor.

And, you know, we always cover our eyeballs and hide the forks.

Q: Your main character in ‘The Caline Conspiracy,’ Aidra, plays a smaller a role in your first novel, ‘Fate’s Mirror.’ Is there anyone we might meet in ‘The Caline Conspiracy’ who might have a larger role in, say, your next novel?

Yes there is! Fans of our superhacker, Morris, will be happy to know he’s in the mix. This time around, Aidra butts heads with a by-the-book cop named Cariatti. He dislikes everything about her until she helps him foil an annoying reporter they both hate. Cariatti also reappears in our next novel, which comes out this fall. We’ve been having a lot of fun writing his scenes.

Q: How do you define success regarding to your writing career?

Groupies! The more the better!

We kid, we kid. The truth is, we have modest goals for our fiction. We want to put out the best work we can, sell a few books, get some great reviews and eventually sell a lot more books. So far, so good.

Q: Easter is coming up, which means ALL KINDS of amazing candy. Jellybeans, Cadbury eggs, Peeps. What is your fave Easter candy? And, if you could do an Easter egg hunt anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Amos is wondering if calines have to wear bunny ears at Easter or if it's just him.

Candy? Did someone say candy? Margaret would like to pretend she has a discriminating palate, (she’s a former restaurant critic) but honestly, she will eat all the candy. All there is. Even those cheap jellybeans that cost 99 cents a bag and taste ever so faintly of soap.

Harry is low-carbing right now, so no candy for him. But if he could, he’d divide his love between peanut butter cups and dark chocolate peanut M&Ms. Remember ET and the trail of Reese’s Pieces? That’s Harry and dark chocolate peanut M&Ms. He would follow a trail of M&Ms right into the lair of a hungry carnivore.

You know what would be a great place to have an Easter Egg hunt? The Starship Enterprise. As long as we watched out for temporal anomalies, tribbles, and the occasional alien with a huge forehead, we could find all the eggs. That is, if George Takei didn’t find them first. (Seriously, that dude is everywhere!)

Q: And of course, the question I ask all my guests: cheese or chocolate?

Harry is firmly team cheese (that whole low carb thing). Margaret is team chocolate all the way. We may share a brain, but our taste buds are all our own.

Have you ever pulled off the perfect prank? The one that has you laughing so hard you cry and maybe pee your pants a little? One that’s both funny and cheeky — but doesn’t hurt anyone or damage any property? I can only think of one time I pulled off a prank that met that criteria. I was at the mall with friends, and I was sixteen.

You might think this prank takes place IN the mall, but oh no. It takes place just OUTSIDE the mall. As we were leaving, we spotted some yellow caution tape cordoning off a part of the sidewalk (I think they’d just repaired the sidewalk), just outside the main doors. Here, let me set the stage for you.

(Side note: I have NO IDEA why it was called London Square Mall either. This was Wisconsin, about as far from Piccadilly Circle and Her Majesty as you could get. But props to them for trying to be creative.)

We were all staring at the caution tape. And I think we were all thinking about the sidewalk chalk we’d just purchased. A whole, huge tub of it, just waiting to be opened and used.

And so you can imagine what we did. We drew a crime scene behind the yellow tape.

My friend Cara, brave soul, actually laid down on the sidewalk so we could get the outline right.

We were fast. Exacting. Ninjas of chalk, really.

And then, when we were finished, a bus pulled up. A whole, huge bus full of old people being taken to the mall on an outing. And through the glass, I could see their eyes as they took in the (crime) scene we’d just created. And it looked something like this:

And then? We nearly couldn’t make it to our car because we had lost it with laughter.

Later that afternoon, we returned to the, uh, scene of the crime, and there was a huge puddle of water where someone had washed away all the chalk.

To this day, I love thinking about the complaints that prompted that cleanup.

So this one time? There was this half marathon. It was in Wisconsin. And it had LEINENKUGEL’S in the name! And I thought to myself, “There is no better half marathon in the whole world.”

And I signed up for it.

Except, I’d never done a half marathon before. And I didn’t read the fine print. Which said, and I quote:

Half Marathon course: (Challenging) Nice mix of hills and flats. One major climb at about the 4.5 mile mark. Finish with a taxing 1,000 meter gradual climb.

Before I knew it, I was running by myself and bawling my eyes out because I wasn’t just tired and overwhelmed. I was also last. Dead last by about a half mile. I mean, the water stations were closed down by the time I got there. I was humiliated beyond belief. And so I stopped. At about mile seven I threw in the towel. I said screw this race, and I gave up.

Until now.

I might be slow, but I think I can do this race now. In fact, if I have to crawl over the goddang finish line, I’m going to do it and I’m going to beat this stupid course. I didn’t have many New Years resolutions, but this was one: I am going to finish the Leinenkugel’s half marathon.

And, here’s the other thing. When I did this race before, I was in a pretty unhappy place. I was in a struggling relationship, I felt hopeless about my career prospects, I believed I was fat, and I thought, “If I could just finish this race, I’ll be worth something.”

And when I didn’t finish, I just felt six thousand times more hopeless about myself.

Now, though, I know the truth. It doesn’t matter what I weigh, where I work, how fast I run — nothing. I matter anyway. I wish that, before, even if I had been dead last, I would have felt proud for even being out there. But I just wasn’t in that kind of a head space. Things are different now, though, which means this course and I are going to meet again. And even if I’m dead last, I’m going to finish. And then I’m going to celebrate among people I love, and who love me back.

And that is going to be a major, major victory.

I discovered the more time I spent on my bike, the easier it was for me to run. And that got me thinking: What other areas in life benefit from cross-training?

After halting a lot of my regular exercise routine in a desperate attempt to finish novel number four (which I did, praise Baby Jesus), I got enough out of shape that it was a bit of a struggle to jump-start my workouts again. Running was always a challenge, but it had become absolutely grueling. I wondered if I’d ever get back to where I was.

And then something happened.

While vacationing in the Keys, Rob and I put major miles on our bikes. We pedaled long distances every day. And I discovered that the day after a long bike ride, if I tried to run, it was easier. A lot easier, actually.

It was cross-training. And it was totally working for me.

So that got me thinking, if biking makes running better, what other areas might cross-training apply? I could think of a few right away:

Reading always makes your writing better.

Trying new foods can make your cooking better.

Listening to music can enhance your ability to play an instrument.

Rob says skateboarding made him a better snowboarder, and that being an actor has made him a better filmmaker.

Showing vulnerability makes friendships better.

These were just a few I thought of off the top of my head. For me, it was a reminder that there isn’t always a straight path from A to B. Like, if you want to be a better writer, definitely practice writing — but also allow yourself to read, to watch movies, to put away the iPhone and just let your mind wander.

Anyone have cross-training thoughts, or ways in which one area in your life benefited from exploring something supposedly unrelated?

This Thanksgiving, I am glad for the usual things — friends, family, an amazing job and colleagues I love — but every day I find I’m more and more thankful for the Occupy movements around the country. Their work to bring attention to corporate influence in government and to highlight the struggles of everyday people is both important and overdue.

Not everything about the movement is perfect. Far from it. But I’m still thankful for it, despite the flaws. Because for every messy-haired hipster the media wants you to focus on, there’s a smart, Atlantic-reading professional like Caitlin Curran there, too.

More to the point, I’m thankful because if the long lens of history has taught us anything, it’s that these movements are always derided as lame, unorganized, ridiculous, superfluous.

For example:

Crazy radical Alice Paul, who fought for women's rights, was brutalized at the Occoquan Workhouse (prison) in Virginia.

Women, do you like to vote? Or own property? Well, let me tell you, the suffragists at the turn of the century who fought for those rights had a horrible time in the media. After publishing their Declaration of Sentiments, these women totally took major heat. People called their actions “shocking and unnatural.” The movement became the subject for “sarcasm and ridicule” (Golden, James L. The Rhetoric of Western Thought, p.226).  And don’t get me started on the women themselves! Why, they were awful. Some of them even (*gasp!*) “smoked cigarettes on principle, drank Russian tea and talked with an assured and deliberate frankness of sex and of their own sex experiences,” (quote by Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, who actually joined the women’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s in England).

They didn’t have pepper spray back in those days, but the police and enforcers sure found other ways to attack the protesting women. In November 1910, Charles Mansel-Moullin wrote a letter to London’s Daily Mirror saying: “[Marching] women were treated with the greatest brutality. They were pushed about in all directions and thrown down by the police. Their arms were twisted until they were almost broken. Their thumbs were forcibly bent back, and they were tortured in other nameless ways that made one feel sick at the sight… These things were done by the police. There were in addition organised bands of well-dressed roughs who charged backwards and forwards through the deputation like a football team without any attempt being made to stop them by the police; but they contented themselves with throwing the women down and trampling upon them.”

I’d be hard pressed, however, to find a woman today who isn’t thankful for the courage and work of these women, especially in the face of a society that trampled  and derided them.

Attacked by the chemical industry and labeled as alarmist, Rachel Carson sounded the early warnings about the danger of misusing pesticides.

And hey, as long as we’re talking about fringe people doing fringe things, how about those hippies during the 1960s? Oh man, what a sorry bunch they were, with their free love and stupid clothes and crazy music. In fact, if you listened to Richard Nixon, they were Communist un-Americans (See also: Mason, Richard. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority).

Well, guess what? Now, there’s this thing called equal pay that means my employer can’t pay me less just because I’m a woman. And there’s no longer this thing called the draft, which means my husband or son (if I ever have one) can’t be shipped overseas involuntarily to fight a senseless war. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, too. Those are pretty awesome. And no way any of it would have happened if it wasn’t for those hippie students who protested on campuses, and the masses of people who marched in the streets.

Hey, are you glad your ten-year-old isn’t working in a factory?

Are you glad you can vote without being beaten?

Are you glad there’s not rat poison in your bread or (more) chemicals in your water?

Well I am. Ergo, I thank the reformers. The hippies. The fringe writers, like Upton Sinclair. The environmentalists like Rachel Carson who worked to keep our water clean.

These movements are messy. They’re imperfect. But I’m okay with that.

I’m more than okay with it, even. I’m downright thankful.

[Image sources: Occupy picture from Occupy Portland, OccupytheNews.tv; Alice Paul Picture from AlicePaul.org; Rachel Carson from RachelCarson.org]

It’s Halloween time and you know what that means, kids. I want to hear all about your bestest bestest or worstest worstest Halloween costumes! And yes, I’ll be going first.

So. Picture it: Sixth grade and I decide to dress up as the coolest person I can think of. My choice of trick or treating garb should tell you a lot about how seriously uncool I was because I chose … Albert Einstein.

I might have been the only sixth-grade girl in America that year to dress up as a famous physicist, but there you go.

Well. You can imagine how well this went over with the sexy witches, sexy fairies, sexy princesses, and sexy kitties who were my classmates. In a word: not.

But dude, you guys, I was a totally believable Albert Einstein. I rocked my nerddom. I embraced my relativity and rode my space-time continuum to awesomeness. When I look back on this picture, all I can think is, “I am SO glad I wasn’t a scarecrow or a pirate.”

So. Now, I want to hear all about your memorable Halloween garb. And if you tell me about it in the comments, you’ll be eligible to win Carrie Harris’s totally Halloween-appropriate book, Bad Taste in Boys. There’s zombies! And kissing! It’s awesome. Also awesome? Is Carrie. She lives in Michigan too, and I heart her.

Please comment away, and may the best costume story win!*

*Which I will totally decide because my name’s on the blog but I promise to try and be super fair.

I made it. I actually MADE IT to Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon. It was a big moment for me, probably because once you write a book with the word ‘donut’ in the title, people just automatically assume that you love donuts. And, okay, even though the book was about more than just fried dough, it sort of turns out that I do, I do love donuts, more than I realized, and places like Voodoo Donuts (tagline: “the magic is in the hole!”) have become really, really important.

Anyway.

I followed the signs…

then saw the building …

and tried not to freak out at the carousel of donut heaven spinning before me.

Finally, I ordered a maple bacon donut and a Fruit Loops-covered donut, both of which were like eating sunshine and sparkles all rolled into one.

I handed the nice lady behind the counter a copy of Donut Days, which I’d signed for the store, and she asked me, “Have donuts always been a passion of yours?”

“No,” I answered honestly. But that’s before I met awesome people through donuts, and traveled for donuts, and had my picture taken with donuts, and bought a suitcase full of donuts that changed my life. (Some day, I will tell that story.) In the meantime, suffice it to say donuts haven’t always been a passion of mine, but they sure are now.

As a writer, there have been many dark moments when I’ve despaired of ever being picked up by an agent, of ever seeing my work published, of ever finding any kind of writerly success. It was during one of these dark periods, when I was writing an early draft of Donut Days, that my mom and I went shopping and I spotted a necklace with pink sparkles. It had one word written on it: Hope.

My mom bought it for me that day and it was instantly a fixture around my neck. I told myself that until I was published, I was going to wear the necklace.

I wore the necklace until the pink sparkles became dull, until the chain broke and I had to buy a new one, until the silver tarnished and sort of made my skin itchy.

But then, one day, I got a call from my agent. And my writing life was never the same. I retired the necklace (er, at least the “Hope” part of it; the chain is long gone) to a dusty drawer of a jewelry box. Until today. (Sorry in advance for the craptastic camera work.)

Because something happened today.

My friend Ang (who you may remember from such posts as A Valentine’s Day Story That Has Nothing to Do With Valentine’s Day) bought me a new necklace. And it has one word on it: Balance.

As I struggle to juggle a full-time job, a blooming book career for which I’m enormously thankful, and a side job helping other authors out there, balance is what it’s all about. I need balance right now like Rebecca Black needs auto-tune. Which is to say, a lot.

I don’t know if I’ll wear the necklace every day like I did “Hope,” but I don’t think it’s coincidence that these messages come into my life when I need them.

And, Universe: I’m totally listening.

When I decided to go see Paul Reubens — a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman — at South by Southwest (sxsw), I figured it would be a mildly entertaining session with an eccentric actor. I reasoned he’d be largely aloof and would likely gloss over the fact that he was arrested in 1991, which almost sank his career permanently. I figured sxsw was just a big promotional gig for him, and he’d peddle his something and move on.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Paul was warm, genuine, and completely humble . Right away he addressed the elephant in the room — i.e. his arrest. It was one of many moments during which he a.) brought it super real and b.) confessed to struggling as an actor. Another moment he discussed was when he heard his great friend Phil Hartman (now, sadly, deceased) tell him that Pee-wee wasn’t a character he could build his career on — that Paul needed to broaden his comedic repertoire if he was going to be successful.

Phil had already made it in a way that Paul hadn’t — he was on Saturday Night Live and was enjoying success voicing characters on the Simpsons. Paul could have listened to his knowledgeable friend, placed Pee-wee on the back-burner, and moved onto other things. But he didn’t.

Paul felt with everything in him that Pee-wee was it. That Pee-wee was the character to focus on. He knew — right down to his white patent-leather shoes — that if he found success in this business, it would be through Pee-wee.

Paul was right.

Later in the session. he choked up a bit as he talked about Cherry, the chair from his television and Broadway show, and his Pee-wee suit going to the Smithsonian. Who would have guessed that such a quirky character would wind up being so deeply ingrained in our hearts and imaginations? I am in awe that Paul listened to his gut, that he pursued Pee-wee when others were telling him not to.

I hope I’m brave enough, like Paul, to listen to my heart when I hear advice that doesn’t resonate with my creative vision. I hope I stick by my characters when they need me to. I never expected to be inspired and enlightened by Paul — and Pee-wee — but I’m so glad I stuck around and wound up leaving that session with not just my mind full, but my heart, too.

Thank you, Paul.