Plotting Penelope

In between shuttling cross country runners and field hockey practice, getting children to sit and do their summer work they've ignored for two months, and maintaining (sort of) the house, I've abandoned Penelope to wait until her writer Odysseus returns (when school starts).

But it doesn't mean I've been idle.  Writing a book means more than character development, it requires plotting out the rollercoaster the reader will enjoy.  It must have dips and turns, twists and unexpected plunges.  It cannot be a straight line or it will bore the reader.

The sheet of paper looks like this:

The first bad day.  (Why Penelope opted to go with Odysseus after her father lost the race).

The worst day. (When Agamemnon and company came to visit).

Being in charge.  Defense, food, maintaining infrastructure, being mom, being alone among the ruling class, alone among the single mothers, an alien in charge of everything, and isolated from everyone.

Being held accountable.   When big plans fail.   When little things are lost.  When there is nothing about tomorrow, save the dull hope, they might come home.

Everyone falls.    Rumors abound of Odysseus being not only alive but enjoying himself on some island somewhere with a woman rumored to be a goddess.   His mom commits suicide.  Her son is a peevish adolescent.  It's ME time.

Everyone fails.   Odysseus returns, and the deaths of 104 suitors and the twelve servant women who served them, and the resentment and fear of the remaining citizens, makes Penelope someone now everyone fears, and Odysseus someone, no one trusts.

The long decay.  Twenty years of rotting, trying to pretend that day didn't happen and neither did the twenty years apart, and of everything around them revealing, all of it did.

A reminder of everything.   People from the past come, telling the story that's become part of everyone else's lives, a dream version with fantastic outcomes.  

Everything burns.   Fight where Penelope and Odysseus finally speak face to face about everything and the cost of all of it.

Rebirth.  

Summer Brain

I was going to post on Monday. 

I forgot my blogger password.  When I went to go to yahoo to check my email to get a new password, I'd forgotten that one too.  At that point, I declared the day over, took the kids to the park and bought ice cream from a truck.  

It's summer.  My brain cells are on a need to use basis only. 

So this morning when my daughter came to me with 4th grade math (fractions), I worried before she showed me the problem.  At what point do I allow this mental slide into the permanently beached ice cream coma stop?  I decided it would be when I couldn't do the math. 

The problem with doing the math, I had to do it.   The problem with having done the math, was the cold slap of older children's homework looming. "Hey Mom, what do you know about the Scarlet Letter?"  Hawthorne...read Blithedale's Romance for senior comps...read Scarlet letter because I'd never read it and decided I should, so it's been checked off but no analysis.   "Hey Mom! I need a poster."  "Hey Mom? What do you know about McCarthyianism?" 

My desire to go running to the nearest ice cream truck is strong.

Panic Time

Long time followers of this blog know that I loathe summer work projects even more than the children do. I think summer is a time when one should discover how to entertain one's self, how to play and structure the day because one wants to enjoy every slow sticky hot moment of it.

The math books are evil and tedious and I should know, I've had to cattle drive my children through the same series for the past nine years.  I tell them that I don't like them either and provide a steady weekly bribe of ice cream for compliance with a minimum of nagging.  We all know math is mostly like served overcooked vegetables, a life experience that sometimes just requires a lot of personal will to endure.   So they don't get too worked up by my nags and I also don't stress that they drag their feet.

Then we got to August and my oldest daughter put down a count down to school.  And I saw that while my kids had handled the math, summer reading had decidedly been put off.  It isn't that they hadn't been reading.  They devour books.  It's just, they hadn't read "the" books.   Finding the assigned titles took about a week. 

Why did it take a week?  At the beginning of summer, I entertained the delusion that my kids would respond to a rational argument. Presenting them with their required texts, I suggested they knock these out the first week.  The books were dutifully taken by my children and dully brought to their rooms, the books were opened, the first pages of the tomes inhaled and promptly discarded when one of the children shouted out, "Hey! Phineas and Ferb are on!" and somehow from that point, summer passed.

So starting on the first of this month, I tried being gentle, easing them back into their responsibilities.  "Have your read today?" wasn't specific enough.  Entire series of Manga, comics, past devoured favorites all counted.  "Have you read ....insert required book here?" got a one word response..."No."  with the follow up if the child was fully awake, "I don't know where it is."

Finally, it became obvious that these sorts of conversations would simply repeat themselves until I located the  necessary books again.  I placed Passage to India, Cricket of Time Square, Touching the Spirit Bear, The Phantom Tollbooth and the Adventures of Flat Stanley on their respective beds and notified their owners. 

They were even grateful. 

So when I sent them off to bed, I felt secure that they would see the book, open it, and reading would start.  Around 10:30, I noticed the lights were still on in two children's rooms. 

Smiling to myself as I climbed the stairs, imagining them lost in literary worlds, I entered my son's room full of benevolence, ready to be pleased as punch that my child was still up.  He'd flipped his bedside table, attached a hot wheel track and was balancing a lacrosse ball on the track and making it go back and forth.  Let us just say, I wasn't amused when he asked if he could stay up a bit later if he read. 

Disturbed, I went to my daughter's room, again hopeful.  Alas, one was busy drawing fairies.  The other plugged into a classic rock station bobbing her head and making a tower of plastic horses.  The books were on the floor. I believe the first words out of my mouth were "RRRRAUGH!"

Downstairs, I saw was lit by a dull electronic glow and sure enough, the child with the least number of summer days left, with the most to read, was watching videos.  Knowing that they don't just have to read these things but produce projects and reports, I'm left with only one option. 

"Children, I know what you're gonna do today. And if you get your projects done this week, we can go to the agricultural fair and get funnel cake." I may be Mom, but I'm much more Phineas and Ferb at heart.