If you read my post a couple of days ago, then you already know of my sympathetic feelings toward Hillary Clinton in regards to the long shadow her husband continues to cast.

Way back in November, according to an article by Tom Brune for the Newsday Web site, the concern about “the Bill question” was already rearing its ugly (read, having a bad hair day) head. Brune quoted University of Southern California law and international relations professor Edwin Smith as having cautioned that “Appearances of impropriety or awkward political moments could arise, as happened while Hillary Clinton was running for president.”

“An awkward political moment” is certainly one way to describe Hillary’s loss of cool last week. It is understandable that she would be a little reactionary to questions that seem to cast doubt on her independence from Bill. It might even have irked her slightly that while she was holding court at a press conference Tuesday morning with Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez, what people really wanted to know about was Bill’s meeting with the President at the White House to share with him the information garnered from his trip to North Korea.  This time, Hillary kept her comments about Bill-related issues to a bare minimum. Bill’s information was “extremely helpful,” she replied. ‘Nuff said.

But just when it seems Hillary should be able to move past last week’s “Bill-ious” episode, yet another Bill pokes his head out into the arena of U.S.-North Korea relations: current New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Good grief–another Bill stepping into the ring? And just what exactly would have prompted the North Korean diplomats to approach Bill #2 now?

According to MSNBC, Richardson (the former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. during the Clinton Administration as well as Clinton’s Energy Secretary [Bill’s, not Hillary’s, in case you’re confused]) stated that the “visiting diplomats spoke positively of the meeting with [you guessed it] Bill Clinton and seem to want to engage.” Ah. Bill. Again. Apparently Bill #1 and Bill #2 are on speaking terms again after Bill #1’s own Bad Hair Day (and you know I mean that figuratively, not literally) back in April ’08. Too bad for Hillary–this is starting to feel like one Bill too many.

To someone like me, who’s only a casual observer of politics, Hillary’s upstaging on North Korea this week by the two Bills makes it look like she’s becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of the diplomatic set. Having one Bill rattling around undermining her presence on the world stage was bad enough, but adding a second one into the mix makes it seem like the President, the Bills, and the North Koreans are attempting an end-run around the Secretary of State, rather than engaging with her directly. Edwin Smith is looking pretty prescient at the moment.

Hillary must be so tired of hearing the name Bill by now (I know I reached my own saturation point long ago.) I imagine her doing her best Jan Brady impression : “Bill, Bill, Bill!” , and now, “Bill Richardson! Bill Richardson! Bill Richardson!” I am only surprised that it took so long for her to finally lose her composure over yet another reference to “that sacred name”.

For her sake, I truly hope she avoids turning on the Weather Channel for the rest of the week…

This past Sunday, Garrison Keillor’s column presented an interesting take (his are always interesting takes, let’s face it) on the state of (newspaper) writers in the age of “new media”. When I read the following, I felt like cheering out loud:

“I’m an old media guy and I love newspapers, but they were brought down by a long period of gluttonous profits when they were run as monopolies by large, phlegmatic, semiliterate men who endowed schools of journalism that labored mightily to stamp out any style or originality and to create a cadre of reliable transcribers. That was their role, crushing writers and rolling them into cookie dough. Nobody who compares newspaper writing to the swashbuckling world of blogging can have any doubt where the future lies. Bloggers are writers who’ve been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession.”

Woo-hoo! Semiliterate gluttons! Writer-crushing editors! Profession-squashing journalism professors! I felt like standing up and cheering–still do, actually, so excuse me for a moment…there! I’m back, and I feel refreshed, although my neighbors across the street are hurriedly gathering their young children back into the house. Sorry.

“Crushed” is a term I believe applies to most of us poor souls afflicted by the profession of writing. We are crushed by insecurity, crushed by rejection letters, crushed by editors, crushed by readers who don’t “get” us, crushed by the plots barreling around in our minds, trying to escape (the inside of my head, at this moment, resembles nothing more than a demolition derby. I keep waiting for the short story I’m working on to collide with the novel and article I’m trying to finish in a terrible, mental Malachi Crunch. I think, if you start seeing steam spouting from my ears, it’s too late to save me.) It begs the honest question, to be sure–why do it then? Honest answer: I must. There’s too much in there that needs to come out. Just what would that be, you ask?

A fellow blogger (who also happens to be my brother and the person responsible for infecting me with this condition-johnchagerwrt.blogspot.com) asked his readers what they want to read. For me, I guess, the answer would be inextricable from what I want to write–they would be one and the same.

I want to read something that surprises me, catches me off guard, whether it’s a plot twist, an ending, or the unusual twist of a character’s development.

I want to read something that teaches me something I didn’t know before, whether it’s a bit of history, biology, geography, or something more complicated, like the intricacies of the human spirit. Anything calculus-related, however, need not apply.

I want to read something that makes me think (but not too hard–see above.)

I want to read something that moves me emotionally. I don’t care if it makes me angry, makes me squirm, makes me cry, or scares the living daylights out of me–just move me, damn it.

I want to read something that transports me, makes me ignore my family and forget to eat, drink, or sleep. (The family’s not too happy when I stumble across those rare books, but I am ecstatic–plus, I lose weight.)

I want to read something that, when I turn the last page, I feel bereft, at a loss for what to do with myself now that I’ve finished it.

In a nutshell, that’s what I want to read.

Now to set to work writing it…

You know, the expression “Bad Hair Day”  has been around for a while; according to one source, its earliest printed use was in 1988. Literal usage describes a day when, despite your best efforts, your hair is frizzy, flat, or frumpy; figurative usage would be a day where your hair is frizzy, flat, or frumpy and you break a vase over your husband’s head when he helpfully comments on that fact.

I think we all have literal bad hair days from time to time (some of us more often than others: see Susan Boyle, Donald Trump; I myself favor Gene Wilder on occasion), but as a general rule, it’s the figurative ones that cause more problems.

I was just watching a popular morning news program covering Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s news conference in Kinshasa (if you haven’t heard about it by now, don’t worry–you will), wherein she snapped a shrewish retort to an innocent, albeit poorly translated and ill-conceived, question about “what her husband thought” about China’s growing influence.

“Wait, you want to know what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state – I am.” You could read her anger from the twentieth row back.

You know, I felt sorry for her at that moment. I am not a Clinton fan, to be honest, but even so, I still admire and respect a woman who has worked so hard to accomplish so much. And I can certainly feel sorry for her that, even in the face of such accomplishments, her knee-jerk, momentarily unguarded reaction to that question reveals her fears that she will never be completely out of her husband’s shadow. Bill’s Rescue-Hero impersonation of last week and the ensuing lovefest, though laudable, cannot have helped assuage those fears in any way, either.

But what really burned me this morning was not Hillary’s loss of composure–I’ve been waiting to see Hillary Clinton tear someone’s head off since Monica Lewinsky first reared her ugly head (see Bad Hair Day parenthetical, graf 2). No–what burned me was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell’s offhanded comment that Hillary was “clearly having a ‘Bad Hair Day'”. 

Wait a minute, wait a minute–are we talking literal, or figurative here? If it’s figurative, I’d have to agree, but as far as literal goes, well, let’s go to the video: Um, yes. Mitchell appeared to be correct; the Secretary of State was indeed, having a literal “Bad Hair Day”.

What?! Are you kidding me? You’re following the Secretary of State‘s international tour to some of the more dicey parts of the world, and you’re spending time covering the state of…her hair?!

It’s bad enough that Clinton has to spend so much of her time scrabbling out from under her husband’s lingering shadow, especially this last week, but to then put her unfortunate snappishness down to a possible poor choice of hair product that morning is ridiculous, and what’s more, it helps reinforce that persistent, opportunity-stifling double standard that a woman has to do everything a man does and look good while doing it in order to succeed.

Did anyone ever make a comment about Madeleine Albright having a bad hair day? Did anyone ever care about Madeleine Albright’s hair? No, because she was the Secretary of State, for crying out loud, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.!–she had bigger fish to fry than choosing the right hair spray for Bosnia’s current humidity level.

And with that, I was angry–just about as angry as Clinton herself appeared in the video. When are we going to stop talking about powerful, accomplished women’s hair, their pantsuits, their fabulous arms (do you know that you get over 1, 470,000 hits if you do an online search for “Michelle Obama’s arms”?), their choices in designers, and start taking them seriously?

Until we do, I think many women, myself included, are going to be facing an endless future of Bad Hair Days, and I mean figurative ones here, because those are the days when you misbehave, when you snap, when you throw that vase at that unsuspecting moron’s head. If that’s what it takes to get some respect, well–wasn’t it Eleanor Roosevelt who said that “well-behaved women rarely make history”?

You go, Hillary–I may not agree with your politics, but I do support your right to have a Bad Hair Day–of both types. And Andrea Mitchell, stop talking about Hillary’s hair–you’re doing her and the rest of us an injustice.

When I was reading Stephen King’s On Writing, he told would-be writers to read as much as they could, whenever they could, even provided a reading list at the end of the book. I was kind of irritated when I read that particular piece of advice, as my reading time at that point had recently diminished to a level where “reading time” meant the 5 minutes I spent in bed at night fuzzily reading the same sentence over and over without realizing it while simultaneously falling off a cliff into the sleep of the truly comatose. Read? When? With what time or energy?

But lo and behold, I guess I’ve somehow been managing to sneak reading in somewhere, because I just updated my reading list on LinkedIn and found that I have, in fact, read 27 books over the last three months–27! I can’t imagine where I found the time (heck, I couldn’t remember the titles of some of them until I read back through my list, to be honest, let alone figuring out what day it was I read them.) And by the way, you who are speed readers out there and whose children are not at home for summer vacation, I don’t want to know that you polished off 48 books in the same time period, okay? 27 for me was a surprisingly plump number.

I scanned the list, reminiscing over the titles. Wow–The Unforgiving Minute? I read that? Yes, I remember now–that was actually really fascinating. The Ten-Year-Nap (Um, yeah…book club book… I do remember that one, if only vaguely…) A Confederacy of Dunces…I’m going to tuck that one away right next to Armies of the Night, on the shelf of books whose writing I admire tremendously but the reading of which irritated the hell out of me…

All of a sudden, reading that list, I found myself so happy–would that be the right word, happy?–to see it, proof as it were, detailed in something I’d only been doing as more of a lark more than anything (there is currently only 1 person following my list, which is possibly one more than there is following my blog. That puts my reading list squarely in the “Lark” category…)

Anyway, it was proof, as I was saying, that I have been reading, much more than I realized I had; proof that I’d also been thinking about what I read (27 books read, and I only recommended 9; of those, I only commented on 3 or 4); proof that my mind, which I’ve been feeling increasingly was on summer vacation right along with my children, was still hard at work, reading, thinking, evaluating, humming along with its inner workings still operating quite nicely, thank you.

Yes. Happy. I was really happy that LinkedIn has that feature, not because I think anybody but that 1 other person out there will pay the slightest attention to what I’m reading and what I think about it, but rather because it I occurred to me that I can use that list now as a tool to track for me, not for anybody else, what I’m reading and whether I liked it and why/why not. (Yes, I know, I could just write the same stuff in a notebook and accomplish the same thing, but this is so much easier and less time-consuming. And, you can look the books up on the site and put their covers right next to your entry about them–it’s like looking back at old yearbook photos of the people at your high school reunion: You look at their faces and wonder how much they have changed since you last saw them, and realize how much you have changed…but I digress.)

LinkedIn’s book listing is just so much sexier than an old ratty spiral notebook–but then, I am married to my Help Desk, so perhaps I’m biased in favor of technology making things easier. Don’t hassle me too much about that, please–I only replaced most of my ratty spirals with a laptop about three years ago. (Just between you and me, I still carry a small one in my purse, just in case.)

So that’s where I’m at today, Mr. King–I’m reading, I’m reading, I’m reading–Hey! I even read you! (if you don’t believe me, check my LinkedIn page for the proof).

Well, it’s a good thing I basked in the sunlight a few weeks ago, because the progress outlook has been generally dim since my article was accepted. There have been additional rejections to swallow (I’m getting fairly practiced at doing so now), so there hasn’t been very much of an exciting nature to add.

I did have one glimmer of hope pop up on the horizon, when my dream agent actually requested a partial review of my latest manuscript, but sadly, today, she informed me it didn’t draw her in. Ah, me–back to the drawing board.

In an effort to get right back in the saddle (see earlier post), I have been writing like a fiend this morning. I worked up interview questions for an article I’ll be submitting later this summer and submitted a couple of modest essays and my first short story to other possible forums for publication.

That’s the part of this whole business that I think I find so dispiriting: the hoops to jump through to get someone to look at your work are very time-consuming. If I spend the time working on that end of the business, it takes time away from the creative part of it, which is where I really want to be spending my time and energies. But I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s been hard finding the time (and solitude) to write creatively anyway, as it is, what with the kids home from school for the summer now. I was always a believer in year-round schooling, but my support only increases during the summer months when I realize just how much I’ve enjoyed having the extra time to write.

When I’m with my kids, I feel guilty that I’m not writing and working on something that will help me achieve my goals. When I’m writing, I feel guilty that I’m not spending time with my children–I know, it’s the classic conundrum of the working parent, but since I don’t actually earn a paycheck at my “work”, I think my guilt at burying myself in it from time to time, “optional” as it is, may be heavier than your average guilt load.

I hope that someday, my kids will not look back on these days of summer sun and a closed office door between me and them with enormous amounts of resentment.

How did J.K. Rowling manage it as a mother-writer? Everyone’s heard of how she would write with her baby in a carrier at her feet–that’s fine, for a little while, but what about when they’re mobile, and verbal (very verbal, in the case of my offspring)? What, then?

Oh, well, enough pity partying–if any writer-parents out there want to respond and pass along their sage “How-I-Do-It” advice, I’d be happy to hear it.

In the meantime, write on, write on.