I am not that good at being in the moment. And especially not today. My attention span is about two seconds long, and I'm all about the future at this time. I'm thinking about:

A new job for next school year.

A new book to write that I've only just begun to brainstorm.

The sun damage that I had blasted with a super powerful light that will darken and then fade next week.

Nothing is about sitting in my chair and doing the work, word by word. I don't want to do my two hours here today. I might not do a great job. But sure enough, I'm here doing it.

So far, I read the prompt in a book called Write it! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire. I do not then write poetry, but I visit PoetryFoundation.Org, type in a keyword from the prompt (today it was "smell"), read another poem (today it was a great one called "Smell is the Last Memory to Go" by Fatimah Asghar), and then do some journaling (today it was about juxtaposition and hopes for the future). It's been good, I guess. It hasn't been bad.

And now I'm here doing this writing. This counts as writing.

 To be honest, I'm feeling a little queasy at the moment. It's not because of the cyber sickness which has dogged me for many days, but rather because I was trying to drum up some mystery ideas by reading a chapter on the decomposition of remains.

I drew the line at reading the details of bodies in the desert and also ear prints. I mean, gross. My stomach started to turn as I read about bodies in the water and the weird fatty substance that develops. 

I decided that should I need to know these details for whatever plot I develop, then I will learn then. In the meantime, there are enough gross things about being alive and living with three boys and two dogs.

 In my quest for the perfect idea for book four, I've been thinking a lot about guns.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. I've been reading about guns this morning (and only this morning) in an oudated book about crime scene investigation.

Specifically, I'm thinking about derringer revolvers, cute little handguns like the one in the purse of Miss Scarlett in the movie Clue.

Your grandmother might have such a revolver if she's the gun-toting sort. And what might your grandmother have done or do with said weapon? That's exactly the kind of thing her granddaughter will have to investigate, don't you think?

There are few lessons I have to learn over and over again in my life.

One of them is HOW TO JUST BE TIRED. Sometimes, life gets away from me, and I require a major or minor medical event -- face infection, migraine, unrelenting motion sickness, or strained hamstring to remember that I should take a break and rest.

I remembered and learned that lesson again last week when I had the migraine, the motion sickness, and the hamstring problem. Then I lay around all weekend and dozed, and now I think I feel better. We're having gorgeous weather today, and I feel hopeful and optimistic about what's next. 

Here's a preview:

• In April, I'm spending two straight hours per day at my desk writing or thinking about writing. I'm doing that right now. The blog will probably benefit. I cannot count other tasks like working on renewing my teaching license as part of these writing-specific two hours. 
• I will also be renewing my teaching license, a task that will require additional hours per day. Should I have spread this work out over five years? Yes, indeed. Did I? Nope. Not even a little bit.
• I might be joining TikTok and making content. Lord, help us all. I have mixed feelings about this because I've been listening to a super great podcast called Under the Influence by Jo Piazza. Makes you think twice about your online personal brand, but at the same time as an author, I need an online personal brand.
• I have been big on body positivity messages lately. Here are a couple of my favorites: "It's okay for your body to change," and "Think about what your body can do, rather than how much it weighs." That's random, but it's on my mind. As are Cheetos and their healthier alternative, Peatos. I'm eating the Fiery Onion Peatos right this moment. They're not kidding with the fire.
• Track season is underway as of this afternoon. It's time to reboot InstenseTrackMom.Com, my fake website for my intense sports momming alter-ego. I just turned in a book about youth sports, so I'll be paying careful attention to this gal in the coming months.

 This premise challenge was pretty hard. But, today I'm getting it done:

1. A city gal goes to college and falls in love with a guy who wants her to then move up to live on the Alaska homestead with his family. They have a reality television series, and she needs to be on it. And have a pit toilet and hunt bears.

2. A woman puts an app on her kids' phones that lets her read their every text without them knowing. She accidentally finds out way more than she wants to know about her son's friend group and their weird friend-hazing cult type thing. She tries to stop bad stuff from happening and ends up in a compromising situation.

3. A woman hates her stepfather. She's always just had a bad feeling about him. When her mom dies and the woman starts cleaning out the attic, she discovers that her stepfather is actually much worse than she imagined...and her mom might have been complicit.

4. An animal-lover can't stop getting animals. She has many dogs and cats, plus a couple of fish tanks, four guinea pigs, a handful of gerbils in separate cages, and a tortoise. It's hard to explain this situation and the accompanying smells when she starts to date.

5. It's the 100th year of a summer camp. There have never been deaths at the camp before ever in the camp's history, but this time, there are two in a boating accident. The trauma turns up other secrets of the camp from past and present.

6. A woman enters a writing contest and doesn't make the finals. This snub puts her over the edge, and she starts to stalk every finalist, turning up in their towns and at their online events to heckle them and make their lives miserable. This isn't a good career move.

7. A kid plagiarizes a paper, but it turns out his dad is the one who helped him with the plagiarizing. And the dad is the headmaster at the school.

8. A woman was on The Biggest Loser back in the day. She has since learned that The Biggest Loser is very bad... it messes with one's metabolism in a way that makes it impossible to maintain a healthy weight long term. Plus, the trainers yelled at her so much that she now hates every single thing about herself if she's not working out. She seeks revenge on the trainers.

9. A woman wishes to buy a vintage typewriter and finds one on Facebook Marketplace. She drives a half-hour to pick it up from a stranger. The stranger is odd and wears ill-fitting clothes. When she gets home and types on the keyboard, fantastic words and sentences spew forth. It might be haunted.

10. A woman has not seen her father in many years, and when she does see him, she's stunned by his youthfulness. He might have discovered a secret and dangerous drug to prevent aging. She launches an investigation.

Quick and dirty. And Done.

Well! Here we are a few days behind. In my defense, we got a new president. Joy cometh in the morning, and the reign of terror is finally over. Also, it has become clear that a major tenet of my marketing plan for my second novel (out March 16th from Penguin Random House) is me contacting everyone I know and asking them to preorder my book. 

Ahem.

Please preorder my book. Do it from this place, and then you get access to my launch event with Nora McInerny. This is very important. I will also sign your book before the shop ships it. Nora is a BFD, and you're going to want to see her. Besides her brilliance, she usually looks very striking and has a bold lip.

Ok, moving on. Really quick, here are four more dead bodies that could turn into novels.

There might be a dead body in the back room of the bookstore and here's why: An author moved from central Minnesota to New York City when she was 22. She hadn't written a full novel yet or secured an agent or a book deal. She had a chapbook of pretty good poetry and started an online journal. She had three other jobs she did while also trying to make it as a writer, including one in a sandwich shop. After a few years, she gives up on her impossible life in the big city and crawls back to her small town. People think she's too big for her britches. She tried and failed, and now she should pay. She gets a job in the independent bookstore, and two weeks later, she's dead in the back room.

There's a dead body in the locker room at the Super Bowl. It's not a player or a coach. It's a woman who was very vocal about fighting against the rampant sex trafficking that happens at the Super Bowl.

There is a gal who has been a life-long student at a prestigious all-girls Catholic school. This young woman is a star at that school: she has top grades, zero uniform violations, and also she has prayed the rosary with the Archbishop of the Diocese as a representative of her school. And then one night, she's caught in the monestary with a cocktail of questionable drugs on the same evening one of the elderly nuns has been found dead.

One more.

A popular progressive news host on a channel very much like MSNBC disappears after uncovering documents that link a conservative general to war crimes. She had been warned not to release them, but she did anyway, and now there's hell to pay... maybe by people who've been sworn to protect her safety.

 My last post was misnumbered. After today, we'll be up to sixteen. And, both of these premises will be about... MURDER.

First:

Sarah Smith went to a state school in Wisconsin in a beautiful small town adjacent to an idyllic river. "Stay away from the river when you're drunk," her mother warned her before she left for her freshman year. Every so often a kid would drown in icy water in the winter after doing something stupid on the way back to the dorms after a party. During Sarah's first year, a kid did just that, and the victim happened to be named Sarah Smith, just like our protagonist. 

It was just really weird and kind of creepy for our Sarah that someone with her same name suffered this horrible fate. For at least a year afterward, people kept telling her they thought the victim was her. Professors, students, strangers, friends from high school. Five years after she graduates, our Sarah starts finding strange posts on her social accounts, things she hasn't posted, about what she's done and where she's gone. She changes her passwords, and it keeps happening. Then, she gets a letter in her mail one day with a return address from the same small town in which she went to school. "It should have been you," the letter says. And Sarah starts to investigate.

Now, here's story #16:

Lauren James always wished her dad was dead. He was not such a great guy and impossible to get a long with. Him dead would have been easier to deal with than their weird estrangement. The last time Lauren sees her dad is at her high school graduation. Her dad looks awful there, wearing a baby blue suit several sizes too small. He criticizes Lauren's appearance, pointing out her round cheeks, her thick upper arms. 

On the way to the graduation, Lauren wishes again that he were just gone. 

But, Lauren didn't kill him. She's suspect number one when he's found soaked in blood and vomit in his condo. Lauren didn't even know he lived in town, but her jackass older brother fed her as a suspect to the police. He showed them text messages about how much he hated him. His replies, equally as damning, were conveniently deleted from his feed.

The police don't have enough evidence to arrest Lauren, so she starts investigating. She's only 22, but she's scrappy. Her bitchy grandmother on her dad's side is her first suspect.