Oh, my dear blue nun ...

I've decided to do this raw (not in the raw -- you should be relieved to hear) -- but raw nonetheless, meaning that it's late at night. I'm having a drink -- and for the sake of honesty, I'll admit it's from a screw-top bottle of Blue Nun, which my husband bought as a joke in honor of my new kid novel THE SLIPPERY MAP, which features nuns (like Sister Eloise of the Occasional Cigarette). It came out on Tuesday. It's a drinkable joke and I'm inclined to drink it, which says something about me. I'm not going to be tidy. I don't know whether the perfect blog -- the kind Plato would assert if Plato had been a blogger -- should be tidy, but if anything the word blog itself seems to suggest you could really spill it, feeling tired and raw, and a little drunk on a single glass of Blue Nun. (I'm no real drinker -- not by any standards but certainly not by Southern writer standards.)

There is no way to explain my writerly life -- buckshot comes closest: 4 novels for adults, 3 collections of poetry, 5 kid novels and four more books under contract (2 adult and 2 kid)-- or my motherly life -- four kids ages 12, 10, 7 and five months -- or my university life -- I teach in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University. People ask about how I manage, and I use circus metaphors -- juggling, balancing act -- war metaphors -- these trenches. I say, Well, it's like trying to write in the middle of a Jackie Chan movie. Sometimes I tell people the story of a prolific woman writer whose name I was never given because maybe she doesn't exist who wrote a ton of books until her last child went off to college and then she stopped. Writing novels was just an elaborate ruse to get out of parenting. Usually, I gush about my husband. Nothing's possible without him. He's been a stay at home dad for six years -- we met in grad school, and during our courtship, we were both jockeying for home-maker. (That's what he puts on forms that ask such questions: home-maker.) Once an uppity writer asked me how I write so much, and I said, "You know, I'm bored of answering that. Tell me, how do you manage to write so little?" But mainly when people ask, I'm tap-dancing in various ways. I don't want to contemplate the how-of-it. I don't know how. I only know that I have to and so I do.

Instead let me give you some short-takes from my day, just today:

My mother calls this morning to tell me that she hasn't heard from me in a few days and she is worried.

My mother calls again tonight to tell me that my grandmother compared my mother's favorite composer, Rachmaninov, to Sammy Davis Jr. - claiming they were both just too damn much. My mother says, "You could write a whole poem about that."

My husband and I talk about shoving another college into the two-week east coast whole family tour. He says, "What are we doing with the dogs for two weeks?" This hadn't dawned on either of us. We don't answer.

My editor tells me she'll okay the check for Book #2 of the contract due on summary -- but I thought she okayed that weeks ago. Mini-panic sets in.

The plumber tells my husband that the new toilet we bought is a piece of crap. I picked it out because it was cheap. Now I worry I'll have to pay for a nice new one even though we have a new one. When my husband asks how much it cost to install all the stuff we had installed, he says, "Don't say it out loud!" because I'm sitting right there and should be sheltered from such things.

Should my female narrator be a bird breeder? Maybe. "I could do a lot with bird breeding metaphors," I tell my husband over grilled ruebens.

The neighbor tells us about her charity case -- a 31 year old woman dying of cancer who has four kids. We're pushing a stroller and walking the dogs. On the way home, my husband says, "You were thinking about adopting those kids. Weren't you?" I admit I was. "We can't take four. We're set up for one more," he says. "Or so."

My daughter tells me she's finally decided to stay at her current school but negotiates a math tutor -- fine. I try to negotiate more piano practicing in exchange but it's a no-go.

I say to the baby, "Why you growl and growl?" I spend a lot of the day growling in response to his growls and I wonder if this is good, all of this growling. Is it good? It kind of feels good to growl throughout the day.

My second son tells me that "our show" is on and to hurry. I have no idea that we have a show and am surprised to find out it's reruns of The King of Queens.

I promise to throw a party for an editor on October 5th. Josh Kendall -- anyone know him? I don't. He's probably lovely.

During a commercial with Venice in the background, I tell one of my sons that we should go there. He says, "How much money do you have, anyway?"

I remember my dream from the night before: writing Burt Reynold's biography.

I write an email to my chair about the proposed Sexual Harassment Policy.

I ask my second-grade son if there's any follow-up about the written apology he gave to the girl in his class whom he called a "hottie." He reports she's doing fine!

I warm up leftovers while nursing.

I tell one of my students that I don't understand if he ever has sex with his older Dominican "girlfriend" in his essay. I tell him that maybe the heroin was the eroticism of their relationship. He agrees.

One of my sons comes home late at night from soccer with my husband and daughter, and he looks so grown, so much leaner and taller than I remember him and it's like he's been gone for years. This is the way time works.

I work on an essay for Real Simple about my mother's obsessive-compulsive disorder -- a little obsessive complusively.

I clean one pair of ears, one belly button, an elbow cut.

I ask my husband if my daughter is still wanting to play the saxaphone. I recount my short-lived stint as a saxaphonist. Do we need another instrument in the house to ignore?

I write an email to my husband that reads only: smoke detector batts -- call tax people. love -

I rewrite a first chapter of a new novel and talk through how to make a woman who has an affair loveable. My husband offers suggestions. We decide it's because of her mother's death and I add that her father is obsessed with the vocalizations of fish to compensate for his loss. "Fish vocalize?" my husband asks. "Yeah, I looked it up. Like 180 species of fish vocalize."

And now I'm writing this. And perhaps you can see why I'm tired, why I was willing to drink Blue Nun. Maybe you can see that there is no metaphor for this. Life does as it pleases. And maybe life is too much -- which would make Sammy Davis Jr. and Rachmaninov not too much at all really -- if they were going for verisimilitude, they were dead-on.

I've decided that we should always drink our drinkable jokes. And so I end with a quote from a children's book we all know and love (a very odd surreal psychedelic children's book) -- "Drink me!" And goodnight.

-- Julianna Baggott is the author of Girl Talk, The Miss America Family, The Madam, and Which Brings Me to You (co-written by Steve Almond), as well as three books of poems, most recently Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, and writes novels for younger readers under the name N.E. Bode -- namely The Anybodies trilogy. For more: www.juliannabaggott.com and www.theanybodies.com. For good bookish deeds: www.booksindeed.org, a nonprofit she co-founded with her husband. And for writerly nourishment, www.southeastreview.org, which she helps oversee.