Perhaps we should've gone earlier, or not at all. Every year since she was tall enough to ride The Octopus, we've taken the little angel to Worlds of Fun for roller coasters and barker games. She's nearly fearless when it comes to eye-popping drops that scare adults. But we never went after the Halloween decorations went up before.

The little angel didn't make it through the first Harry Potter book or The Lord of the Rings movie. She was existentially scarred by a P!nk video. I thought we could detour around most of the scary stuff at Worlds of Fun, but at one point we exited a coaster into a brightly lit area with resting fog machines and extinguished strobe lights ... And baby dolls splashed with red. She saw them before I directed her to look at the cement while I led her through it. She couldn't look at the scary part at one-tenth intensity.

She heard the theme song from Dr. Demento while eating dipping dots by The Mamba, her favorite roller coaster.

They're coming to take me away, ha ha!

I'd never heard it before, but I hated it. It's a little chilling, especially when you're aware of very real mental illness. She mentioned several times how scary that song was, and inside, I agreed. I take no pleasure in imagining losing my mind.

She wanted to play the game where she won Tiny the giant gorilla last year. We had to set Tiny out for the trash man after the room in the basement where he was flooded, and he got saturated. There was no choice. He would've molded. I think in her head all she had to do was get back to that game and play again, even though the game is so impossible that the only prizes available are taller than a kindergartner, even though it was a fluke of life she won the first time.

After her first round, she cried. I'd given her a budget and she blew through it in ten minutes, the last few throws as reckless as a sports fan up too late in Vegas, playing the spread with the mortgage. When it was over, I saw on her face how very hard this reality was to stomach, like when she found her baby teeth in my closet and buried her head in my shoulder at the loss of the Tooth Fairy.

She cried for a long time, tried to blame me for the loss off Tiny, for her inability to win another, making us that family fighting in public. We shut her down, and it was a long and silent ride home.

She couldn't get to sleep for an hour and a half tonight. She appeared downstairs and asked for my help. As I smoothed her hair, she told me she kept seeing those baby dolls, but it wasn't just the dolls. It's how hard it is to grow up. To love the coasters and be scared of clowns with sharp teeth. To want to dress up but jump at things that spring out at costume shops. To ask yourself, as I see her asking herself, if you should be able to hack this stuff now and knowing in your heart the answer is "no." I know because I keep asking myself the same thing as we careen around this corner of childhood and see adolescence as the next exit on the freeway.

I told her to imagine touching the creepy dolls when they popped into her thoughts like she does the games she plays. Imagine them turning into kittens when she touched them. I am running out of tricks as she gets older and begins to see things I can't explain away. Sometimes people do things that are ugly. Sometimes you see a trailer for a scary show while you're watching something innocuous. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you run out of money without winning a giant gorilla. I can't change that.

"What if I run out of kittens?" She asked, tossing and turning as the sheets twisted around her sweaty face. It's that weird, in-between season when it's too cool for fans and too hot for blankets.

"You can never run out of kittens," I said. "Haven't you ever seen the Internet?"

It took another half hour before she finally fell asleep, but she didn't say anything more. I lay there, waiting for her to find peace in sleep and hoping I was doing it all right.

But I watched it anyway. Best six minutes of my day. 

The days float past quickly, benignly. I am bored without being bored. It's not the painful boredom of childhood but the foggier boredom of a hospital stay. I try to tell people what happened in my day, but nothing is really that important, and rehashing it feels unnecessary. It was a day. Pleasant. Nice weather. Yes. I think about watching television, but most television is stupid, and only when I am truly bored does this knowledge really bother me. I look at the covers of magazines when I go to pick up my prescription and know the angle and ending of every article without turning the pages. It's all so predictable. Maybe this is aging? It doesn't hurt so much as annoy me. I binge book after book looking for a new ending. For a surprise.

I am not sad about the boredom, because I know it will end soon. I can remember spending periods like this in my past, and they never last long. I can feel myself floating in it, this nothing-space, when I don't have much to contribute nor do I feel the need to take much in. My days are like the end of a Prince song, or the laser part of a Grateful Dead show, when you realize twenty minutes in that holy shit, it has been twenty minutes and I've just been standing here staring at that tree.

I leave my house only when necessary. I jog the same routes and realize as I'm coming back up my driveway I barely remember turning around at the halfway point. I find myself walking around my kitchen, shuffling items until they slot back in their proper places. We are hovering, the house and I, waiting for something to change. The leaves, maybe, or my mind. Until then, paused.

I wrote about something that almost happened today that would've changed my whole world. 

The billboard flashed by from the side of the road as I struggled with the glare of a dusty summer and using leftover diaper wipes on the inside windshield of a top-down aging convertible.

CHIEFS.

There is a guy I pass sometimes while jogging in my neighborhood with silver on his temples. He runs wind sprints up this hill in a way that makes me wonder if he didn't used to play.

CHIEFS.

He waves at me as I shorten my strides to get up the hill without walking. He's nice.

CHIEFS.

I've never played bat or ball sports. I don't know what that feels like, though I've competed in nerdier capacities. But the things I've competed in have always been very nebulous and subjective. No clear right or wrong.

In the instant when that billboard flashed by, it occurred to me people like sports because it's always so clear, the rules.

There might be bad calls, but there is a right way to pull a lay-up, a right way to clear a hurdle, a right way to achieve first and ten. Not like Syria. Not like healthcare. Not like how to stop the increasing gaps between the haves and have nots.

Instead, there is Sunday afternoon.

CHIEFS.

Someone wins, someone loses, and there are rule-based reasons why. In a world with only the haziest of bottom-line driven boundaries, there are brackets.

In brackets, we can feel safe.

In tailgates, we can identify with our communities without worrying whether we share politics.

Sports are the last bastion of black and white in a global world.

I get it. I bought Beloved tickets to the US vs. Jamaica in soccer this October, partly because he's turning 40 and loves soccer, and partly because it might feel refreshing to cheer GO USA without there being a war attached that I don't agree with and can't support.

I've spent my whole life not getting it. But the world has always been ethically complicated, and it's taken me until my fortieth year on this planet to realize how strong the temptation is to turn my head and run wind sprints up the hill. I think that neighbor of mine used to play. I may not like the game, but maybe I'm starting to understand the need to watch.

CHIEFS.

Don't even get me started on the origin of that name. It's a post for another day.

If you are currently participating in the YA Scavenger Hunt, my page is located here.

In a few weeks, I'm going to be participating in my first ever YA scavenger hunt with sixty other young adult authors. Each of us is offering a book, so you could essentially win an entire young adult library doing this thing. Here's the explanation from the organizer, author Colleen Houck:

I'm very exited to reveal to you the 60, count 'em 60 authors that will be featured on the Fall 2013 YA Scavenger Hunt! That means that not only do you get access to exclusive bonus material from each one, and a chance to enter so many contests that it will blow your mind, but there is also an opportunity to win an entire library shelf full of books because each author will be giving away one featured book as a prize. - 

Here's the line-up:

THE BLUE TEAM

ANN AGUIRRE

AMBER ARGYLE

ANNA CAREY

SHELLEY CORIELL

KIMBERLY DERTING

TARA FULLER

CLAUDIA GRAY

TERI HARMAN

KAY HONEYMAN

AMALIE HOWARD

SOPHIE JORDAN

ALEX LONDON

DAWN METCALF

ELIZABETH NORRIS

KATHLEEN PEACOCK

KIM BACCELLIA 

CARRIE RYAN

JESSICA SHIRVINGTON

APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE

JILL WILLIAMSON

_______________________________

THE RED TEAM

GENNIFER ALBIN

GWENDA BOND

RACHEL CARTER

JULIE CROSS

DEBRA DRIZA

MICHELLE GAGNON

SHAUNTA GRIMES

RACHEL HARRIS

P.J. HOOVER

TARA HUDSON

JESSICA KHOURY

KATHERINE LONGSHORE

PAGE MORGAN

AMY CHRISTINE PARKER

AMY PLUM

C. J. REDWINE

OLIVIA SAMMS

J. A. SOUDERS

CORINA VACCO

SUSANNE WINNACKER

_______________________________

GOLD TEAM

RITA ARENS

JESSICA BRODY

TERA LYNN CHILDS

TRACY DEEBS

SARAH BETH DURST

COLE GIBSEN

CYNTHIA HAND

LEANNA RENEE HIEBER

COLLEEN HOUCK

MICHELE JAFFE

SUZANNE LAZEAR

MINDY MCGINNIS

LEA NOLAN

FIONA PAUL

LISSA PRICE

GINA ROSATI

VICTORIA SCOTT

ELIZA TILTON

MELISSA WEST

TRISHA WOLFE

---

I'm still familiarizing myself with how this works, but it's going to be really cool. It runs from October 3-6. I'll be preparing some bonus material for THE OBVIOUS GAME, as will the other authors, and I'll run a giveaway here as well as the main one. Lots of fun! I can't wait to read some of these other books, too.

I'll use this URL and update this post and push it up to the top when more info is available, so if you want to participate, you can bookmark this page. More soon!

DJ Nibbles loves YA.

This week I'm finishing up my shitty rough draft of THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES to send to my beta readers, and I'm pretty sure it sucks and they will think less of me for reading it. Yesterday, I tried to list THE OBVIOUS GAME on a discount site, but it wasn't accepted. I suspect it's a little heavy for their genre-heavy readership, which I totally get, but it was disappointing because I could use the boost in visibility on Amazon. This year I've watched other blogger anthologies rising to heights SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK never saw when it came out. I realized a long time ago I don't have the personal following it takes to nudge my books over the echo chamber wall of who I know into the mainstream world of who I don't. It would take marketing dollars to get there, marketing dollars my publishers don't spend and I can't spend. I understand the business behind the business, but the art/business marriage keeps separate apartments. 

When I get low, Beloved always says, "But you got published." 

To which I retort, "But I didn't take off."

To which he responds with a frustrated stare, because he is never able to convince his ambitious and bullheaded wife that her goals are too lofty for her circumstance and abilities. Which is basically the premise of THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES. It's something I have struggled with for years -- when my overgrown ambition does battle with my talent and financial support.

This week, BlogHer syndicated a post by Kyran Pittman, which discussed why creative people compare themselves to the superstars of their fields when accountants and bus drivers don't. She writes:

The actors who don’t get Oscar nominations, the authors whose books don’t make the bestseller lists, the songwriters who don’t go platinum, the cellists who aren’t Yo-Yo Ma -– they aren’t underachievers.

Oh, the metrics available in this world, how bone-crushing they can be. I've stopped looking at metrics more than once a week for anything -- my blog, my books, my weight. There are too many ways to measure yourself with indisputable numbers in 2013. I'm the type of person who prefers problems with no one answer. Am I a success? The numbers don't lie. But subjectively, am I a success? It depends on your perspective.

I fight every day to push away the feeling that everything I do artistically is the adult equivalent of chalk drawings on the driveway before a rainstorm. 

But Kyran's right. The point isn't to matter to everybody, it's to matter to somebody, and it's my job to beat back the emails telling me I'm not doing enough to market my work and the emails trumpeting who won this or that award or made this or that bestseller list. I can't really manufacture that any more than I can force a stock to go up or down on Wall Street. 

Who and how many notice the art can't be more important than the existence of art. The existence of the art has to be the point.

And so a new day starts, and I remind myself this again. 

"Mama, why does heat make you so tired?"

We crossed the street and headed into the art festival. We're heat-hardy, my daughter and I, indiginous to the sultry Midwest summers like goldenrod and cone flowers. The 105-degree temperature didn't stop us from wanting to look at paintings until we hit the pavement, where temperatures had to be even higher. And the humidity, thick like a washcloth, making it hard to breathe.

"I'm not sure, exactly. Maybe so you'll be forced to slow down and it will be harder to give you heat exhaustion. It's probably your body's way of protecting you."

Each step seemed a little harder. The heat wrapped around my body. I could feel the air molecules pressing on my skin, heavy and saturated. I looked over at my daughter. Her pale cheeks had a high flush with beads of sweat hanging above her lip, unable to evaporate in the thick air. 

"I don't feel good," she said.

My head swam. "I don't, either. Let's get out of here."

I had to pull her by the hand the two blocks back to the car. I actually felt a little dizzy as I squealed onto Main Street and directly to the QT, where we stumbled into the delicious air conditioning and gasped for filtered air. We bought a huge bottle of water to share and hung out for a few minutes by the freezers, alive in our skin in the way of extreme temperature relief -- those first few moments when the cold limbs tingle with warmth or the icy air hits hot skin and you think, in that moment, everything is right in the world, there is nothing better than having this need fulfilled, the return to equilibrium.

We piled back into the car and cranked the air conditioning, turning back toward home. 

"My head hurts, Mama." 

I dropped her off at home to cool down and rest, and I drove to the grocery store to get food, finding myself still wandering a little awkwardly amid the rows, my head achy. 

I don't often have extreme reactions to heat, but when I do, I'm reminded I'm a mortal, that life is delicate and beautiful and to be examined while I have the chance. 

---

In something less heavy, I reviewed lice prevention products on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews, because that is life I want eradicated.

The little angel has graduated to Level 2 at her ballet school. They are very formal there. Parents are neither allowed to watch class (except for very special parent watch nights) nor even exist on the same level as the classrooms while the children are learning their steps. The boys wear black pants and white shirts. The girls wear leotards, color determined by level. 

She started out pink. 

Then she was light blue.

And now she is red. This leotard has spaghetti straps, not the short or long sleeves of pink and light blue. Her feet are women's size six. Her classes are an hour and a half long, twice a week.

This is the first week of ballet school, and I'm finding myself with three hours a week for writing that I didn't have before. I'm excited and mortified all at once at the thought of losing my girl for three waking hours a week. My daughter has never played soccer or tball or volleyball or softball or any sort of thing that required her to attend practices without me multiple times a week. We have been together pretty much every day after school since we dropped after school care two years ago. 

She looks so grown up in her red leotard. Her father even did a double-take when he met us for that first class, thinking we were going to get the same parental talking-to as pink or light-blue. But instead, the teacher rushed through some basics and smilingly hurried us out of the room so she could get down to ballet business. I could tell we weren't the only parents sort of wandering aimlessly downstairs, wondering when our little pink and light blue babies grew up and turned red.

After red is blue. Then green. Then burgandy. Then black. 

I didn't think she'd still be doing this by red. I thought she'd lose interest. But on Tuesday night when she looked around and realized she'd graduated into the older half of the Lower School, her eyes shone. 

I took my manuscript and notepad down to the deserted conference room on the first floor and thought about the red leotard some more. Then I settled down to write.