Super. Man.

"Superman!" my husband yells. "Run Superman!" The group of middle-school boys look up at him, then, tentatively, form a square on the end of the basketball court. (Please let them form a square.) The boy throwing the ball inbounds smacks it, and half the kids jump sideways. Or so they should. They don't always. They're mostly only 10 years old.

My husband is coaching middle-school basketball for the first time in four years, at the small Catholic school both our children attended. He coached when our son was in 7th and 8th grades, and then again the following year after his replacement was seriously injured in a car crash.

He coaches for love of the game, and for love of the players. He coaches because, like me, he understands that sports gives kids discipline, toughness, and pride. He coaches because, like me, he's had coaches who became mentors, who helped him through rough spots in his life. He coaches because he knows he's got a gift to give these players--in many ways, coaching is a vocation.

It's not easy. The time commitment is enormous. Last week: 2 games, 3 practices. This week: 3 games, 2 practices. That's a lot for a surgeon without children on the team. His players right now are mostly small, inexperienced, and young. They'll grow, but not by next week. "Run Superman!" my husband yells, and some of them look confused. They have playbooks. They practice plays. Superman--I could run it, I've been to practices enough.

Sometimes you catch the magic happening. In yesterday's game one boy caught a pass, pivoted, and threw the ball to a teammate who had just come open. It was almost nothing, and yet that boy had never managed it before--the catch, the pivot (no traveling!) the throw (no jump ball!)--and the other boy, too, was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. They did it right for the very first time. It was fabulous.

Over the years I've seen kids who thought of themselves as clumsy, slow, weak, gradually become stronger, faster, more graceful. I've seen how it changes how they carry themselves. I've seen how they become better versions of themselves under my husband's guidance.

Yesterday in the stands one of the teachers reminisced about a boy who once played for my husband that she called the most disruptive, impossible student she ever had at the school. I remembered the child very well, because he would have walked through fire for my husband. I remember my husband saying to that boy, "I love you," and I remember that boy saying, "Coach, I love you too."

This team, this new team, won't run through fire yet. But I think they're starting to understand that they can. After last night's game, after some fabulously good plays and some not-so-go ones, the team gave my husband a Christmas gift. He opened it when he got home, and I heard him laugh. "They gave me a shirt," he said.

"A St. Anne's shirt?" I asked.

"No." He held it up. Royal blue, with a big red S outlined in yellow on the chest. You've seen it before. Superman.

We Are All Uncles Here

I have four lovely nephews: Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Fred. They currently range in age from six to one, and so, as you might imagine, we are all having a blast.

Fred is starting to talk. He calls my daughter, "T!" (you can hear the exclamation point. T! T!). For the rest of us, when he was visiting for Thanksgiving, he just grinned. He grins well.

When I last saw Dewey, which was several months ago, he'd started calling me Aunt Kimmy. Now, very few people on earth ever got permission to call me Kimmy, and most of them are now dead. You're probably not one of them. Dewey's dad warned him that I might not like being called Aunt Kimmy, and Dewey gave his dad--my brother--a long look and said, "Well, I'll just ask Aunt Kimmy."

I really like this kid. He can call me Aunt Kimmy.

Last year, when I stayed a week at Louie and Fred's house, right after Fred was born, Louie, just turned two, called me Auntkim, all one word, usually said very fast "Auntkim, auntkim!", often while launching himself at me. But then Louie got a little older, and he started to realize that "Aunt" was separate from "Kim." He figured out that he had a certain class of acquaintances--four sets total--that went by "Aunt" and "Uncle," and somehow these were mostly equivalent, which made using two titles superfluous.  So he ditched "Aunt" altogether. I became Uncle Kim. We had Uncle Kim and Uncle Bart, and Uncle Dewey's Dad and Uncle Dewey's Mom.

Well, I could see his logic, and I was willing to answer to Uncle Kim. But then at Thanksgiving my children presented a problem. They were clearly pretty much grown-ups, in Dewey's eyes. They must be Uncles too! He started calling my daughter Uncle T.

"She's not your uncle," I said. "She's your cousin. Like Huey and Dewey. You just call her T."

Louie actually has six cousins. Four are right around his age, and the others are my children. My daughter's only 17 but she's 5'10". Louie wasn't buying any of this cousin nonsense, not for someone who was clearly part of the family but also clearly a grownup. "Uncle T," he insisted. And so she remains.

We are all uncles here.

Another Reason Not to Start The Egypt Book

So I thought I was finally, finally ready to start writing the Egypt book. Not today--today I have this brief morning interlude between seeing my daughter off to school and going to yoga, and from there I proceed directly to Faith In Action (my yoga studios has a shower, thank the Lord) and then it's barn chores and book club and the Survivor finale. This, right here, is my writing for Wednesday.

However, I was ready to go at it with gusto tomorrow. Mentally ready, physically ready, ready, ready, ready--or not, as the case turns out to be. Yesterday, a day spent mostly in budget meetings for Faith in Action and body-clipping my mare, two things of relatively equal enjoyment, I flipped open my email and very nearly missed it--a note from my editor, tra la, I've been getting a lot of little emails from her lately, mostly telling me things I already know, such as that The War That Saved My Life was in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. (My friend Nancy called me to tell me that on Saturday at 8 am. My mother called to tell me at 8:30. My editor didn't tell me until yesterday morning.) (It's not a humble brag: it's a full-on brag. I was in the Wall Street Journal!!)

Yesterday afternoon's email was a big email. It was a don't-even-think-you're-finished-with-the-book-you-sent-in-before-Thanksgiving email. A we'd-like-the-next-draft-before-February email, a here-are-the-things-you're-doing-wrong-now email.

A whole nother draft. I'd really thought hoped we were headed for copyediting after the last one. I mean, sure, I added a whole new section of plot, and yes, that does usually take awhile to settle, but I'm a good writer, right? I can do it the first time, right?

Wrong. Writers almost never get it right the first time. I hate this like heck, but my feelings don't alter its essential truth. Probably this is why I get SO ANNOYED every time an acquaintance asks me, "Are you still writing?" Of COURSE I am still writing. I am ALWAYS still writing. Partially because writing is my job, not some funky little hobby, and partially because the books are. Never. Done.

This is also, by the way, the best argument in the world against self-publishing. Left strictly to my own devices, I wouldn't push myself nearly this hard. I'd settle for less than my absolute best. Fortunately, my talented and forcible editor never lets me. So. Back to work, yes, but not to Egypt yet.

P.S. Has anyone ever asked my husband if he was, "Still performing surgery?" No. No they have not. (Though I may pay someone to do it sometime, just to see the look on his face.)

In Which I Achieve 87% of a Handstand

I've never been able to do handstands. Gymnastics in general--not my forte. That's pretty much okay with me; we all have our weaknesses, and heaven knows there are still gobs of activities I haven't even tried. It turns out I'm not very good at pottery, either--though my husband is brilliant at it--but when I took a three-day class in watercolor painting last summer I was surprised at how much it made sense to me. Chemistry? Easy. Physics? impossible. I can play the piano but can't make noise come out of a trumpet. As for yoga, I can sit in Cobbler's Pose with my knees on the floor all day long, and I've achieved Crow, to my infinite delight, but Wheel remains way out of reach. And so it was with handstands.

Last Friday (Power Yoga with Adriel) we spent a few minutes working on handstands in the traditional manner: put your mat alongside the wall, put your hands on the floor, kick your legs up so that they go past the vertical--over your head--and rest against the wall. The problem is, you've got to believe that you've developed enough shoulder strength to carry it off. Because if you turn out not to be quite ready for this pose, your arms might buckle and you'd be diving head-first into a concrete block wall, probably breaking both elbows on the way. You can see how this could happen, and, if you're me, it keeps you from being able to fling yourself into the pose. Sometimes fear is our brain's way of letting our bodies know that we're about to do something really, really stupid.

You can put yourself into down-dog and sort of hop your feet up, but the truth is you won't get to handstand without enthusiasm. In horseback riding we say, "Throw your heart over the fence, and the horse will follow." I could not throw my heart into a handstand.

This had been true for awhile. I don't like being afraid. I've long recognized that many of the best things in my life have come about when I was willing to blindly hurl myself into new experiences. (Writing novels--learning to ride--travelling to Africa--) Hard to know what could come from a handstand, but my perpetual hesitancy was beginning to grate.

Yesterday (Warm Vinyasa) our instructor, Marcy, said we were going to play with something fun. "Mats against the walls!" she said. Then she led us through a series--first Down Dog against the wall, so that our heels were propped on the baseboards, and our toes on the mat. (Hands are on the mat, head down, hips raised, if you don't know what I mean by Down Dog). Then we put blocks against the wall, and did Down Dog with our toes on the blocks, our heels on the wall. Then we moved one leg up the wall.

Then we took a break, because this makes your wrists ache after awhile. Also shoulders. But all of a sudden I got where Marcy was going with it. Down Dog with feet on blocks, against the wall, and then both feet walking up the wall, and then there we were, in handstands, with our toes still gently against the wall, climbing into the pose from the opposite direction, never having had to make that scary jump.

I took one leg off the wall and held it straight in the air. I couldn't quite do the other. I figure it was 87% of a handstand, which is at least 37% percent closer than I've ever been before. My feeling of accomplishment is out of all proportion to the actual endeavor, and I don't care. Yesterday morning I was a yoga rock star.

Today I woke to an email from Marcy reminding me to set my intentions for the coming new year. Here ya go, Marcy: I'm going to do 100% of a handstand before I turn 49 years old. And also, thanks.

First or Third? Reflections on the Egypt Book

Yesterday I was discussing my new book, currently titled "My Egypt Book" (this is how good I am at titles), with my family. (Digression: The War That Saved My Life was originally titled "The England Book;" Leap of Faith was "Kim's Next Book, Which Needs a Title;" (not making that up), and Halfway to the Sky got all the way to copyediting under the title The Geography of Hope, which I still love but Marketing despised.)

What's the timeline? my daughter asked.

The timeline's a bit problematic, I said, because they discover King Tut's tomb so close to the start of the last year of digging. Pacing the book is going to be tricky. It finished after Lord Canarvon dies.

Why are you still researching, not writing?

I keep finding little things. I opened a book I acquired last week--a recent translation in to English of something written by the director of antiquities in Cairo--and found not only the name but a photograph of the Arabic boy who's going to be a man character. I hadn't seen his name before.

Are you going to use his real name?

Yes. It's Hassan.

(Doesn't it get a bit dicey making up fictional characters based on real people? Yes. Yes, it does. You have to 1) tread carefully; 2) be sure readers know what bits you're making up; 3) only do it with big historical stuff. So that I'll use Hassan's name, but I fictionalized the names of Suzanne David's friends in For Freedom, even though she and I knew the actual names of her friends. They could still be alive, they were bit players in her story, and we had no easy way of contacting them.)

Is he the protagonist?

No. The protagonist--the point-of-view character--is a wholly fictional British boy. This gives me a lot more control over the novel.

What's his name?

Probably Elliot.

First person or third? my husband asked.

That's a game time decision, I said. (Note to family: I used a sports metaphor! Appropriately!)

That doesn't make sense, he said.

Sure it does, I said. Either first or third will be right for the voice, and I won't know which until I find the voice. And that might take awhile.

For the record: Jefferson's Sons--the whole, complete first draft--was originally in first person. My editor suggested I try it in third. This is not as easy as it sounds, and it doesn't sound easy. But she was right, it was better. The half-dozen false starts of The War That Saved My Life went back and forth, first person, third, first, third. We ended up with first, which now that I've finished the book seems like the only possible choice, since half the narrative tension is the difference between what Ada experiences and what she thinks about the things she experiences. But there you are: six false starts and six full drafts later, it all looks like I planned it that way.

A Year of The War That Saved My Life

I sat down to the blog this morning planning to write about Christmas songs. I get satellite radio in my car, and this time of year they have designated Christmas-music songs. I find I have lots of opinions about Christmas music, but, coming to the computer, wondered if I'd shared them all before. So I looked up the blog posts from last December, and what I found was a lot about the imminent publication of my tenth novel, 16th book, The War That Saved My Life.

It was published in January of this year, eleven months ago. Yesterday it showed up on Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year list, to go with Kirkus, Amazon, Publisher's Weekly, and the Horn Book's best books of the year lists.

Guys. A Horn Book best book of the year.

Last year I was holding my breath waiting to see how people reacted to this book. It's the book of my heart, the book that took every bit of skill I have as a writer. If there is something better than doing your best work and having people find it to be good, I don't know what that is.

Here's the thing: this book was born in the most painful, hidden places of my soul. Things I wished never had happened to me turned out to be essential--without my past, I couldn't have written this book. I've come to love the things I most wish hadn't happened. Which is sort of the moral to my next book, the one I'm nearly finished writing. It's what I learned, from the book that changed my life.

Another "Oh, Crap, It's Thurs" day

I can't figure out how to make today work. I'm sure it will work--it's not that complicated of a day--but my schedule's off-kilter, and I prefer a really organized, streamlined schedule. I like to know what is going on, and in what order I should tackle everything.

Here is what I know:
--I'm working a bit at Faith in Action today, subbing in for some people who are sick or attending funerals. It's not clear exactly how long I'll be working, but I need to be there promptly at 9:45, because I'm interviewing. On Wednesdays, when I do data entry, I can wander in pretty much at will, which usually means after yoga and a shower and possibly a few errands on the way.

--Because of FIA, and because Thursday yoga is at 9 instead of 8:30, I can't go to yoga today. (There are night classes, which I don't do. On Thursdays the afternoon class is for children and there isn't a noon class. So, no yoga.)

--Because of not going to yoga, I showered before breakfast.

Now. I need to find and buy a child's size Virginia Tech sweatshirt before Sunday. I need to buy mushrooms, razor blades, and Chai tea sometime today. I'm making something for dinner that requires six hours' prep time with an ingredient that's arriving today in the mail--you can see a possible conflict here--and I'm expecting company for dinner, so I need to do a spot of intensive housecleaning. Or maybe just dim the lights. The dog is nearly out of dog food, and of course eats a special brand which she probably doesn't need (it was really for our late dog, who had severe diarrhea whenever he ate anything else. Nothing makes you willing to drive across town for special dog food like severe dog diarrhea.) but which she's used to. The dog's looking melacholy these days--she might have a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or perhaps the mess in my office, her preferred room, appalls her.

Oh, I have to buy four large classy gift bags immediately. Nearly forgot that.

I'm going to try to have lunch with my husband, because we always try to have lunch on Thursdays.

Part of my trouble is that today is Thursday. All day yesterday I thought it was Thursday, even though I was clearly on a Wednesday schedule (yoga/shower/FIA) which means that my mind wants today to be Friday. Here is the thing about Thursday: it is take-down-the-trash day. I absolutely hate it when I miss that.

So. Take down the trash. Go shopping. Buy mushrooms, dog food, gift bags. Go to BFIA. Eat lunch. Start dinner. Clean (a bit). Research the new book, about the discovery of King Tut. Eat, Drink, be Merry. Sounds like quite a day.