OOOH! Look who thinks she’s a novelist!

Anyone ever notice how one day my masthead changed from “The Virtual Hangout of Catherine Dix” to “The Virtual Hangout of Novelist Catherine Dix”?

There’s actually a halfway interesting story behind it that I feel compelled to share with you. Maybe, not halfway… a quarter way? One sixteenth?

Alow me start at the beginning...

When I picked a new template not so very long ago, I decided that I wanted a font that was funkier than, say, Comic Sans or IMPACT. Cuz lordy knows my blog and I are all about the funky! So after three days (in dog years) of combing the internet, I settled on a font called "2Peas Platform Shoes" which you see above, and which I found at one of those cool Deluxe Fonts R Us websites we all love so much. I then started playing around with what I wanted to say via Platform Shoes and this is a sampling of what I came up with:

The Virtual Hangout of Catherine Dix

The Virtual Hangout of Novelist Catherine Dix

The Virtual Hangout of Recycling Nazi Catherine Dix

The Virtual Hangout of an Aging, Tired Woman

The Virtual Hangout of Four Kids and a Lady

The Virtual Hangout of Catherine Dix, Winner of Nothing, Loser of Wallets

…Although that last one’s not true anymore, what with my cow prize and all. But you get my drift.

I finally decided on the first one because it seemed safe and non-offensive to winners and those that don’t recycle. The hard part was over. Then it was just (sort of) a matter of cutting it out of my Word document, pasting it into my blog template and BAM! my masthead work was finito.

More recently, though, I was doing something in my template (which I can’t recall just now) when I noticed that my lovely daughter Toni was hovering behind me as I carefully opened my page and surveyed the premises, trying not to break anything. That's about when she told me the truth about how she thought the font of my masthead was SLIGHTLY too big and looked like it could be ever so SLIGHTLY smaller. I snorted. OOOH! Look who was suddenly an expert in blog design! And then I knitted my brows, cocked my head like the confused puppy that I was, and decided that maybe she had a point. Luckily, I had saved all my “playing around” mastheads so I opened the Word document where they resided, highlighted the first one, changed it to a SLIGHTLY smaller size, did the cut and paste thingy again, hit save and was ready to REFRESH and move on with my life.

But, alas, that’s when I saw that I had cut and pasted the one that had the word NOVELIST in it which, OF COURSE, had been at the top of the page since I had cut and pasted the LAST one which didn’t have the word NOVELIST in it. Are you still with me?

So this is where I panicked. Because how many of you would see this and scoff, “Not yet, Missy!” Probably not many, seeing as how there are a SLEW of sweethearts out there that visit me quite regularly. But no matter. There are a few amongst you that don’t make yourselves known with a comment who could very well scoff at me ON THE INSIDE. And that was enough to cause me to chew on my “novelist” lip and twirl my “novelist” hair with my “novelist” finger.

As you can imagine, I screamed, “I have to fix this before the scoffers see this, Toni!” And that’s when Antonia Josie grabbed my arm, looked me straight in the eyes and said with the firm sincerity of a grandparent: “DON’T.”

“WHAT?!” I said. “Don’t change it???”

“Mom,” she began. “You wrote a novel. You got paid. They printed one. You’re a novelist!”

“Yeah... there was that ONE," I said. "But... I... I was just putting silly words into a pair of Platform Shoes. It wasn’t REAL. And… and doesn’t Novel-IST imply that you’ve written more than one??”

“You’re writing another one,” she insisted. “And you have another story lined up after that. And… even if nobody pays you for them, you write novels. I think that makes you a NOVELIST.”

“Maybe. But I’m also a Recyling Nazi! I’m an Aging, Tired Woman! I’m The Mother of Four Kids! Maybe I should use one of those ones!!”

“NO,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Will you just… be proud this one time? And quit making fun of yourself?”

Sometimes I forget how my little girl has, like, an EIGHTY-year-old soul. The way that she does her homework without my pleading. The way she is brushed, dressed, and sitting in my car at quarter after seven patiently waiting for Jonah and me to eventually join her. The way she walks over to me and says, “Mom, throw those jeans away. They’re so old I can see the yellow polka dots on your red underwear.”

Sometimes, I think she is MY mother. And then I remember that she still needs a night light and I feel a little bit better.

I’m telling you this story, not just because I’m awed by my oldest child but because it's time for an update on that infamous "novel."

Allow me to digress a little. The shitty thing about blogging is that once you start to tell your story to the world, you have to finish it. When I set up this blog at Technorati, it asked some questions like, “What’s this blog about?” At which I melodramatically said it's “A blog dedicated to documenting my adventurous journey toward publication!!” I never knew the journey would be so long, so uphill, or I would have answered that question quite differently. I might've said: It’s about the insanity that comes from living 120 miles away from your husband. Or. It’s about tonsils.

Hindsight is such a weasly little snit.

In the meantime, I’ve made peace with the fact that this book may be published postmortem. And I apologize to the five of you that keep checking in with me for updates. If I can get my hands on a prepub copy, I’ll get it to you for all your lovely interest. Feigned or not, I love you for all your beautiful interest. I've got some beef I can Fed Ex, if nothing else. I hear it ships okay with a little dry ice and styrofoam? Email me if you'd like more details... catherinedix at catherinedix dot com. Or, better yet, come over. I've got some Gouda to go along with my whine.

For now, I'm keeping the masthead up. Because Toni's right, published or not, I sold a book to a great publisher and I'm proud about it. But I reserve the right to refer to myself as a Winner of Nothing in the future.