BANDERSNATCHES

by Steve Steinbock

Thanksgiving Stuffing

I’ve just come home from Thanksgiving dinner. I was very well disciplined.

My sister-in-law always goes the whole nine yards when she does her Thanksgiving spread, so I had to show a lot of restraint. So I’m not feeling guiltily bloated. But I do have a stain on my shirt where the garlic-stuffed olive squirted its juice.

Thanksgiving is a nice holiday. I know that my friends north of the border celebrated theirs last month. It has a nice message, one of gratitude and of families coming together. I find myself getting tired of the expression “Turkey Day.” Perhaps the 19 years that I was a vegetarian sensitized me.

Perhaps it’s my general disaffection with the way holidays have gone fowl — er, I mean foul.

I am thankful for all of you, my friends, colleagues, readers, and writers who participate in this wonderful venture. I’m grateful to James Lincoln Warren for putting this adventure together. It’s been a feast from which I don’t have to worry about indigestion, excess weight, or high cholesterol.

Writing and Parenthood

For my birthday many years ago, my wife had a whirligig made for me. It features a likeness of me sitting at my desk trying to type, with one son climbing on my back and the other son, still in diapers, crawling on the floor with a floppy disk in his mouth. When the wind hits the fans, it cranks my arms up and down at the keyboard. I’d like to show you a picture, but I can’t find one at the moment.

The whirligig brings to mind some of the struggles of parenthood, and of writing. And sometimes the two are oddly similar. I’ve written four books, three of which have been published. (You can search for them on Amazon, but you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for a mystery). As soon as each book is finished, the question I’m always asked is, “What’s next? Another book?”

I typically answer with the following metaphor: writing a book is like having a baby. The process takes a good nine months during which I put on weight and experience mood swings. Conception is usually the most fun. The birth itself is exciting, but also sometimes painful and brings along its own post-partum depression. Let’s weight until this book is out of diapers before we talk about the next one.

I’d love to be the kind of writer who can jump right in and start the next book before the ink is dry on the previous. But I’m not. Not yet, anyway.

We had dinner last week with some friends. The husband is the author of two novels that were both published more than twenty years ago. He’s made some attempts at creating another novel, and has one completed manuscript waiting to see light. But he complained to me that his energy gets eaten up by other projects, including some journalistic work, and feels he doesn’t have enough left over to do the truly creative writing he wants to do. None of the wives at the table understood what he was talking about. But I said, “Yes. You feel like a nanny who loves children. You really want to have your own child, but you’re so busy taking care of other people’s children to be able to get pregnant.” The women looked at me with a blend of dismay and concern. But Dikkon answered, “That’s exactly how I feel!”

I’m fairly certain that 85% of you who read this will be befuddled by the preceding metaphor. Like my friend, I have desires and ambitions to write creative work, perhaps fiction. But my writing dance-card is so full of assignments, projects, reviews, guides, columns, and articles that I have little left over. No, I’m not planning to leave Criminal Brief. The fact is that I enjoy all the little writing projects that I do. Greenwood Press is doing an Encyclopedia of Jewish Popular Culture for which I am
writing an article on mystery writers. I’m at work on a story about language learning using audio CD programs (like Pimsleur). I’m having fun with it all. I’m thankful for the fun stuff that I call “work.”

And perhaps somewhere around the corner, this nanny will take a few hours off her schedule and get herself knocked up.