Jenny McCarthy Article

“Hi, Jenny, it’s Jenny,” Jenny McCarthy said when I picked up the phone. Thus began my first TV celebrity interview. We talked about her latest book, Healing and Preventing Autism, and other books that helped her before she started writing on the topic herself. You can read the article here. Thank you to my friends Michelle and Carrie, two writer-moms with special needs kids who put autism on my radar. The piece wouldn’t have come together without ‘em. Too often “the good stuff” from interviews doesn’t make the article. Here’s a Q&A that I couldn’t work in, but I thought it was sweet and touching:

Q: Are there books out there on how to talk to your child about having autism? How did you do that with Evan?

A: Ooo, I have chills. I don’t know of any, but we need them. It’s timely and relevant. Evan kind of brought it up to me. He said, “Do you remember when I couldn’t talk?” I pulled the car over, I was crying, and I said, “Yes, Evan, I do. Why couldn’t you?” He said, “I don’t know. My words were stuck and I couldn’t get them out.” In that moment I just died because I thought to myself, So many of these kids are really locked inside and they understand. They just don’t know how to get the words out. Evan said, “Well, I used to be like Dory. [Dory the fish in Nemo - where she couldn’t remember her words], but I’m not like Dory anymore.” I said, “That’s right.” You know, I opened up an autism school across the street from my old house and Evan is around these kids. He doesn’t necessarily know what autism quite is yet, but he understands that something happened that caused him not to be able to speak. And he knows that everyday he goes over to the school to help the other kids talk. I think it’s going to be a gradual thing for Evan. An organic way of understanding what happened. I’m not going to be a mom who is going to make him hate doctors and the medical community. I just want to make him conscious and aware of what I call ‘new medicine’ where parents take things in their own hands. Everyone needs to trust themselves instead of what somebody else says. So that’s how I plan on doing it.

Home Sweet California

Woke to daylight

Sweet pineapple and watermelon

Dressed in my best: yoga pants, t-shirt, socks, shoes

Kissed the hubs goodbye (he went off to a conference)

First stop: outdoors

Walking, walking, walking a 6.5 mile loop in North San Diego

Underneath the blooming jacaranda trees

Over their purple flowers dropped on the sidewalk

Tweet, tweet, tweet of birds

Prayers sent up to God on High

Through the smell of sagebrush in the salt marsh

Soft dirt, red bougainvillea, citrus trees . . . . could've walked the entire loop again (but I'll wait 'til tomorow)

Now, settled on a cozy bed with a makeshift laptop desk, writing as I gaze over the blue Pacific (ah, the joys of freelancing)

Happy, happy, happy

One Small Step

Love thy neighbor is not advice. It's a command

--Bono, speaking on the AIDS emergency

The next LIME.com blog is posted, highlighting the book Change the World for Ten Bucks.

A Writer Joke

Q: What did the magazine editor do to Jenny’s article about death?
A: Killed it.

Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, hoo hoo hoo, yuk yuk yuk…I crack myself up.

The article was killed (i.e., cancelled) years ago, and now I’m so grateful because it gave me plenty of time to rewrite a better version. Plus, I’ll get paid twice.

Hawaii

The other night my husband and I were flipping through TV channels when we got sucked into the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s filmed in Hawaii. As I watched the gorgeous scenery – a glowing sun, turquoise waves and white sandy beaches – I thought, “I want to live in Hawaii one day.” I first flirted with the idea of moving to Hawaii for college. My parents said I’d go “island happy” which sounded fine to me, but instead of applying to UH, I let them talk me into attending a school a few hours away in Ohio (where I went landlocked crazy). Anyway, maybe another opportunity to move to Hawaii will come along. Maybe a botanist will telephone me out of the blue and offer me a job, along with a car and a house. Hey, it could happen. It did to Lucinda Fleeson, author of the upcoming book Waking Up in Eden.

To read about Waking Up in Eden head over to the LIME.com blog where I post about books every other Monday.

Book of the Month

Writing about one’s spiritual life is hard. How to add action to the scenes? How to avoid jargon, especially when the spiritual community you’re a part of is unfamiliar to many? But when done right, spiritual stories are my favorite. On a rainy Saturday, I devoured Cartwheels in a Sari by Jayanti Tamm. Tamm was raised in a cult, devoting her life to a self-proclaimed spiritual master who told Tamm she was his Chosen One. As she grew, she began having doubts about her guru, and the book chronicles her struggles as she questions her faith.

Meet Me on Friday

Been working on a long-term book project for ages now. It is research intensive. A bit overwhelming. I almost never have trouble finding motivation to write, but this project has been challenging. I’ve been plugging away at it here and there. Well, here and there isn't cutting it. So...I asked another writer friend to meet me at a coffeehouse every Friday. It’s been dubbed our “difficult assignment” day and we work on projects that we would normally procrastinate over.

Brilliant idea.

I’m cranking.

Kicking butt.

Only one last section to go.

Why, oh why, didn’t I think of this three years ago?