Rooftop Musings

Here I am, seventy-four years old – and female, to boot – and I’m up on my roof squeezing a bit of tar under loose shingles. I check them once a year, before the monsoon season swoops in and blasts us with wind and water. Standard maintenance any homeowner should know to do, but my neighbors think I’m crazy to get up here myself.

Done, I sit on the peak, enjoying the view from my rooftop and musing about life. My cabin’s across the street from the reservation, so it’s nothing but Ponderosa Pines as far as I can see to the west.

I grin, thinking of the view from the farmhouse where I grew up, on the hill overlooking Lake Erie. We’d watch thunderstorms come across the lake from Canada, about fifty miles away. I didn’t need to be on the roof to see that. In fact, I only ever went up on the mudroom roof. It was attached to the house but only one story high. That’s what makes me grin. I’d stand up there with an old fishing pole with a big homemade kite attached to the line, catching the wind that was just enough up there to make that kite soar.

Parents would probably get into trouble letting a kid fly a kite off a roof today, but I wouldn’t swap those times for anything.

My young grandsons have probably never been on a roof. I hope they’ve flown kites. They seem to spend most of their time staring at one screen or another. It’s a touchy subject to address, though. My son would like to get them outdoors doing more, and Lord knows he had his own adventures growing up. I’m pretty sure his older siblings sent him to the roof for an errant Frisbee, then took away the ladder and had him jump into a pile of leaves. I never knew about that until they were grown. Fortunately, the roof wasn’t high and there were a lot of leaves. He didn’t need the emergency room that time.

The mother of his boys isn’t too keen on our stories from his youth. He did tend to go into things head first. I remember the ER doc stitching up his seven-year-old knee, amazed that the kid was arguing with him about the color of the thread instead of crying hysterically. When the doc said so, the kid said, “It’s nothing compared to a golf club to the head.”

That head injury was my first helicopter flight with him, not the last. It’s amazing his brain never suffered permanent damage. The boys’ mother doesn’t understand those stories are a celebration of good luck, resilience, and living life fully.

Dang, the sun is starting to set. I’d best make my way down off this roof before dark.

If you want to listen to this, go to my substack post.

Looking Back

In 2016, I made a respectable amount of money as a writer. I really wanted to make more this year. Instead, I’ve made virtually none. I felt like a failure, until I saved my “Priorities for 2017” as “Accomplishments for 2017” and edited it to reflect what actually got done this year:

I expanded the number of excellent critique groups with which I’m working on screenwriting, short stories, and novels. That was an essential goal and a major reason for my move to an urban area.

Running Away was shown in French-speaking Europe, then was released as a Lifetime movie.

The screenplay for Michael Dolan McCarthy lost an award, but I used their notes to make revisions. With feedback from two screenwriting groups, I wrote and revised a screenplay based on “Maria Angelica’s Baby” – the short story included in Saturday Evening Post’s anthology in 2016. I submitted both of these to the 15th Annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. Results don’t come out until February. I also wrote a script for Frankie and Grace and submitted that and other scripts to multiple network writer development programs.

With feedback from beta readers, I did revisions of my new novel – the story of Peg, the mother in Running Away. Then I met and traded books with Sarita Sarvate and made major revisions thanks to all of her questions and comments. Peg’s Story: In Search of Self has been submitted multiple places. But in light of current events and the general rule that traditional publishing takes its time, I may decide to self-publish to get it out sooner. The character surprised me when she landed in the arms of a trafficker, but the ups and downs of her journey after that will speak to anyone who says “Me, too.” Goal for 2018: Fund an effective marketing campaign.

I sold books at the Citrus Heights Hidden Treasures Art Show, the Oakland Book Festival, the Gold Country Writer’s booth at the Gold Country Fair, and an author event at Book Passage in Corte Madera put on by the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA). I also attended the WNBA Pitch-O-Rama in San Francisco. I sent out a press release after getting a glowing review of Alice and saw a jump in sales of my books at Amazon.

That’s not everything, either. I’ve been tracking submissions and have short stories out all the time. I wrote a script based on one and the actors in the Capital Film Arts Alliance gave it an awesome table read. It may be produced as a trailer when I’m ready to publish a collection of short stories.

I didn’t make much money this year. In fact, after expenses it’ll probably be a loss. My projects didn’t come in first place anywhere and I didn’t get accepted into those writing programs, but I got good feedback from judges. With the input of good critique groups I produced multiple well-written major and minor projects. They’ll eventually be produced or published because tracking submissions and my time has made me more consistent. I’m even posting here weekly.

So while I may not have made much money writing this year, I did accomplish a lot.

The funny thing? In 2016 I did very little writing. The first half I was teaching full time with injuries, the second half I was living in my son’s living room with almost everything buried in storage while I had and recuperated from surgeries on knee and shoulder. The successes and income were from work done previously. So maybe next year…

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