Dead Mice vs. Book Sales

Mice. In our house. We have mice in our house!!!

I was enjoying the first quiet period I’ve had, probably in three years. Kids were asleep; husband was at a garage sale. I was in the recliner, reading. The house was gloriously silent. In this dead silence, a mouse ran into the center of the living room, saw me, and ran back under the sofa. My feet were up. I actually had time to read in the middle of the day. Sometimes, as a mother, you make choices you never thought you’d make when you were single. I kept reading. Then a second mouse appeared (different color), saw me, and ran back under the couch. I debated. I read another paragraph. Then I got up and called my husband on his cell. Miraculously, he had it turned on and he heard it. He’d found a used swing set for $10. I asked him to pick up mouse traps on his way home. I brought my dog in from outside. He didn’t want to hang out with me. He wanted to go back outside, so I had to use the baby gate to trap him in the living room with me. I had this notion that he might catch one of the mice. As soon as he fell asleep, a third mouse appeared, saw the dog, and ran back under the couch. My husband called. He was stuck on the interstate, behind an accident, with the swing set strapped to his little pick-up truck. “Get home as soon as you can,” I said. “I have the mice cornered behind the sofa.”

No more appearances by mice. My husband walked in full of doom and gloom about the mice. “Once you have mice, they’re here to stay. They were all in the sofa??? There's probably a nest in the sofa!” etc. By the time he was done, I was totally freaked out. I had to leave the room when he pulled back the sofa.

There was no nest. There were no mice. The little rascals got by me and my dog. Probably through the ventilation system. We set spring traps. That evening, as we watched TV, I saw a mouse run down our hall three times. Our traps caught no mice.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. We got glue traps. I had a mouse problem in college. Of course, that was in a dorm, in Brooklyn, NY. You expect mice there, but not in Omaha. I am morally opposed to glue traps. Mice don’t die instantly – they suffer. But in college, the spring traps didn’t catch them. And on one quiet, Brooklyn day, when I was studying philosophy in the kitchen and my roommates were gone for the weekend, a family of seven mice walked across our linoleum floor. They also got into all our food, including the bag of bread on top of our refrigerator. So I solved my moral dilemma. I only put the glue traps down when I was home. As soon as a mouse was caught, I threw it out my sixth story window. I killed ten or twelve mice this way. (Relax! They all landed in the courtyard in the center of the building. No one had access to the courtyard).

My husband bought twenty glue traps, which we put out after the kids went to bed. No mice.

Now, coincidently, I have an ebook for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and Smashwords. Every day I can see the sales I made. You might think I’d check daily for a week, then get bored and check weekly. But no, I check my sales about 25 times a day. I feel like a rat, pushing a button to get a pellet. Sometimes, I get a sale, sometimes I get four sales, sometimes I get nothing. In research studies, the more pellets the rat gets, the less it pushes the button. The more intermittent the reward, the more it keeps pushing. So, basically, I’m a rat. A writer rat. Now, here’s the weird part. The first day that I had no sale, we caught a mouse. Then I had sales for four days. No mice. Then a day with no sales, but a dead mouse. So now, I’m torn. Do I root for a book sale, or a dead mouse? And why can’t I have both? Because God thinks he’s pretty damn funny, I guess. Or fate, or the universe, or the Mouse God. Which would you root for? Book sales or dead mice?

The Truth About Dating, live on Kindle!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Truth-About-Dating-ebook/dp/B0045U9RJQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1287237042&sr=8-2

This week my novel, The Truth About Dating, went live on Kindle. I posted it after hearing an interview on American Public Media’s The Story with a writer, Karen McQuestion, who, after years of false starts with literary agents, posted her novels on Kindle. Within six hours she had a sale, and eventually, a movie deal. That’s when a publisher came calling.


The way Kindle works, you upload your book, set your price, and get a percentage of every sale. If you list your book from $2.99 to 9.99, you get a 70% royalty. This is amazingly high. Any other price gives you 35%, which isn’t bad either. I decided to set my book price at $1.00. After all, I wasn’t expecting to get rich from my book sales. I just want people to read it. A low price seemed like a good way to get people to take a chance with an indie author.

Posting the book was a lot harder than I expected. Amazon doesn’t really give you much help, but after a week or so of trial and error, I finally figured out how to convert my manuscript to html and upload it. I had a great cover, done by graphic designer Jennifer Digman.

When I finally went live, I put a bottle of champagne (actually, cava, from Barcelona) in the fridge. I was going to celebrate when I made my first sale. No one knew that my book was posted (except my husband). I started manically checking my sales sheet. It was like biting you nails or any other bad habit. I couldn’t stop, and nothing sold. After two days, I told myself, OK, no more checking for one week. But the next day, I had fallen off the wagon and was logging on to check. And lo and behold, I had a sale. I had sold a copy of my book!

I called my husband from work. He said, “I’ll have the champagne ready when you get home.” But then I started wondering if some family member or friend had stumbled across my book and bought it. Plus, it was a Wednesday night. Did I really want to drink a whole bottle of champagne on a work night? I called my husband back and said, “Let’s save it for the weekend.” Then, just before I left work that day, I checked one more time, and this time, I also clicked on the sales report for the UK. Two sales in the UK! I had sold three books, and two of them in the UK! I called my husband back. It was time to celebrate!

When I got home, he had made my favorite food, popovers. And mac and cheese. And we opened the cava and toasted those strangers who decided to take a chance on an author they’d never heard of before! The kids had juice. And of course, they wouldn’t eat the homemade mac and cheese because they prefer the instant Kraft kind that you cook in the microwave. Kids always help keep your life in perspective. I’m Julie Christensen, author, seller of three books, and mother of fussy eaters. Amen!

Let Your Money Do The Talking And Your Feet Do The Walking

Yesterday I received a letter from Citibank, which said that in order to maintain their profits “amid the rising cost of doing business” (ie: consumer protection laws) they were adding a $60 annual fee unless I spent $200/month on their credit card. For all these years, they’ve been charging interest rates of 18-25% and they now want to also charge everyone an annual fee? I’ve had that card for 21 years. It was my first credit card, and for many, many years, my only credit card. This morning, I called Citibank,
reached someone in India, and canceled my card. I was nostalgic for the 22-year old me who first walked into the Citibank on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, NY and signed up for that card. But it doesn’t pay to be sentimental when you are dealing with loan sharks. It took the man across the world in India just a couple of minutes to close my account. As he hung up, he said, “Thank you for choosing Citibank.”

Wells Fargo has been my bank for 12 years. I even got my mortgage through them. About a year ago, for the first time ever, I bounced a check. It was my mistake. I had the money, but I’d forgotten to transfer it from savings to checking. I realized the very next day, but by then I already had two overdrafts. I called Wells Fargo and explained everything. Talked to the bankers and fixed everything. I thought. But what the bankers didn’t tell me was that Wells Fargo had opened a line of credit in my name and used that money to cover the bounced check. I don’t always read my bank statements carefully. So it was a few months before I realized what was going on. By then, I had already paid over $200 in interest. I went in person to the bank, explained what had happened to a banker, and she said, “This will teach you to read your mail.” She was rude, condescending, and unapologetic.

Today, the New York Times reported that John Stumpf (see pic at right),

head of Wells Fargo, earned $18.7 million in 2009, up 64% from his salary in 2007, and double what Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs earned this year.

Wells Fargo has made their last dime on hidden fees from me. Last week, I moved my accounts over to a regional bank. When the regional bank’s banker heard my tail of woe about the interest charges on the line of credit, she said, “I thought it was illegal to open a line of credit without your permission.” It probably was, but how am I going to fight some fine print written by an army of Wells Fargo MBAs? Wouldn’t it be great if a great collective unconscious drove everyone to move their money out of Wells Fargo? In the meantime, John Stumpf is probably basking in the sun somewhere warm, laughing at how he nickeled and dimed his customers into the poor house while he lives like a king.

Motherhood, novel writing contests, and timing

Timing is everything. On the same week I came back to work from a three month maternity leave, my novel, The Truth About Dating, advanced to the quarterfinalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Out of 10,000 submissions, I made it to the top five percent. Winning the first round of that contest really took my mind off leaving my children behind to go to work. Over the next month, with the first three chapters of my novel posted on Amazon, 61 people wrote reviews. Some were by friends and family, but many were from strangers. I loved checking for new reviews and reading them. I started to believe that a day might come when I wouldn’t have to leave my children behind to go to work. I could envision a life where my work was upstairs, in my study, writing. I held on to that vision when my husband called me at work to tell me that our three month old son had rolled over (accidentally, of course), and when my 21 month old daughter wouldn’t let me kiss her hello when I came home in the evening.

Yesterday, Amazon announced the top 100 semifinalists and my name wasn’t on the list. A month ago, I celebrated my 41st birthday on a Sunday, went back to work on a Monday, found out I’d made the quarterfinalists on a Wednesday. And yesterday my roll in the contest was over. I was just a 41 year old mom who was back at work, leaving her kids behind for 42 ½ hours a week. I found out the news, and twenty minutes later I was at work, fitting hearing aids on a patient. I’m lucky to have the kind of job where I can lose myself in what I’m doing. I was so busy, fitting the aids and teaching my patient how to use them that I completely forgot about the contest until an hour later, when my patient walked out the door. I stayed busy all day, and didn’t allow myself any self pity until I started my walk home.

“I’ll just be sad for the ten minute walk,” I decided. I listened to Tori Amos through my MP3 player and indulged in a little self-pity. A few blocks from my house, I spotted my husband, walking toward me with my son and daughter. My daughter was toddling along, holding his hand. When she spotted me, she screamed with glee. Then she started running toward me. I thought of all the blessings I’ve had this year. I birthed a healthy baby. I and my family are healthy. Bush and Cheney are out of the White House. Pallin is not in the White House. In the middle of an enormous economic crisis, my and my husband’s jobs are secure. I wouldn’t trade any of these things for winning the Amazon contest. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t terribly disappointed, but sometimes it helps to put things into either/or compartments in my head. I turned off my depressing music and picked up speed as I headed toward my family. When I reached my daughter, I bent down to pick her up. She pulled her head away from my kiss and started to cry, reaching out her hands toward my husband, saying, “Daddy. Daddy up.”

Labor Playlist

Like many parents-to-be, I was well-prepared for the birth of my first child. I don’t mean that the nursery was painted (or even set-up). I don’t mean that I felt confident in my ability to handle a newborn or raise a child. I mean that I’d read at least five books on childbirth, my husband knew labor massage techniques, and I had pain management strategies (I was going to try for natural childbirth). Also, I had a labor playlist on my MP3 player.

My first child is now 19 months old and I have a newborn. On a recent spring-like day, I went out for a walk and listened to that labor playlist for the first time. In the rush to the hospital with my first, I left the player behind. With my second labor, I started the playlist as soon as serious labor pains began. Halfway through the third song, my labor became so hard that the music abruptly turned ugly and I couldn’t bear to listen.

But out on my walk, I loved every song. I recalled that when I made the list, almost two years ago, I had tried to gather songs for all the stages of labor. For the early stage, when labor pains are the easiest, I’d gathered what I’d loosely describe as “one with the universe” songs. Alanis Morrisette’s Utopia and You Owe Me Nothing In Return. I thought I might also listen to these songs in Transition, the hardest part of labor, if I reached “labor land.” Labor land is a state described in books as an endorphine high in which you move past the pain and feel an overwhelming love for your baby and everyone in the room/world. Suffice to say, I never made it to labor land. For both deliveries, I was simultaneously puking and pooping during Transition and the pushing that came after was so painful that I wanted to weep.

The second theme in my playlist was “triumphant.” Among others, I had To Live Is To Fly by the Cowboy Junkees; the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar; Tori Amos’ Talula; and I’ve Got Life from Hair. I think I was going to cycle through these songs when the labor pains reached that intermediate stage between easy and Transition, but my labor pains went from “Hmm, is that a contraction?” to white knuckled agony so quickly that there was no time to focus on lines like “I was born blue and weathered and then I burst just like a supernova.” (Bruce Springsteen).

The last category of songs was “fighting against adversity.” Songs included were Sinead O’Conner’s Troy, Dave Matthew’s Cry Freedom, and Who Am I from Les Miserables. At difficult times in my life, these songs have inspired in me the fortitude to soldier on, but labor is not like coping with loneliness or handling failure.

What helped me the most was the presence of my husband. As soon as the music in my playlist turned from an inspiration to an irritant, I ripped out my ear buds and called to my husband. There was no time for massage. All he could do was hold my hand during the rest of labor and the birth, quietly saying things like “You’re doing great.” But his presence helped stop any panic I might have felt from the pain. While he was next to me, I was connected to my life, my family, and myself.

On my walk, the labor mix was a trip through songs that were touchstones for bitter and sweet memories of the past 20 years. None of them brought back memories of my labor. I can’t even remember what three songs I listened to at the hospital. Some of the songs on the playlist reminded me of what I expected childbirth to be: hard, but predictable. Instead, my labor was harried and excruciating. No song on my list was powerful enough to help me push past the pain. I’d forgotten the pain from my first labor, which was why I thought the playlist would work the second time. I remember thinking that the first labor really hurt, but the pain itself was absent from my recollection, almost like it had been erased. The day after my second child was born, my midwife visited me in my hospital room on her rounds. “I can’t believe how much that hurt,” I told her.

“See if you still remember by your six week visit,” she said.

Six weeks are past and I still remember. My baby’s head was 14 ¾ inches around. Toward the end of the delivery, the midwife had said, “You can keep pushing, or I can pull the lip of your cervix back over the baby’s head. It will hurt, but then the head will be out and your baby will be born. Which do you want to do?”

Forget songs about the universe, strength, or triumph. Find me a song called “Get this %#@! Baby Out Of Me Right Now” and I might have been able to play it, or even sing it, during delivery.