"It has to be a good story."

"Sometimes I interview as many as three or four people a night if I'm lucky. But it has to be a good story. That's only fair, isn't it?" -- The Boy, Interview with a Vampire

I was tagged by the lovely and talented Mollie Smith to do a little Q&A. I can't promise vampires, though, not this time.

When did you first start writing?
I've always written. Professionally I'm more of an editor, but I've written children's books, essays, catalog copy, website copy, all sorts of different things.

Was being a writer something you always aspired to be? 
Not really. I always pursued whatever my interests were at the time and I seem to have landed on editing and writing.

What genre do you write?
Right now I'm concentrating on novels but I've written mostly nonfiction. I'm calling Mountains Never Meet and some of the others I'm working on travel-expat-romance.

Can you tell us a little about your current work in progress?
It's my first novel. I started writing a memoir about living in Burundi but somewhere along the line I decided it would be a little more interesting if things happened differently. It morphed into a work of fiction that has nothing to do with Burundi now. (I'm sure Burundi will pop up in future stories, though. I still have a lot of adventures to share from there.)

When did you start working on this project?
At the beginning of this year.

What was your first piece that you can remember writing? What was it about? 
In third or fourth grade, I think, I wrote a piece of My Little Pony fan fiction (before it was even known as fan fiction.)

What’s the best part about writing? 
All of it!

What’s the worst part about writing?
All of it!

What’s the name of your favourite character and why?
Right now I'm in love with my male main character in Mountains Never Meet. Opening up my manuscript every day is like opening an email from someone I have a crush on.

How much time a day/week do you get to write?
I consider writing this novel my job this year so I spend several hours a day working on it. I'm more in the editing and format phase right now but I still make time almost every day for a writing prompt.

When is the best time for you to write (morning or night)?
I'm a morning person, but I often have ideas just before I fall asleep at night so I jot them down and turn them into real sentences the next morning.

Did you go to college for writing?
I was an English major. I concentrated on literature but the program included some writing courses. I minored in film studies so my courses included script writing, too.

What bothers you more: spelling errors, punctuation errors or grammar errors?
As an editor, all of them. As a reader, all of them. As a writer, I don't pay attention to them at all until I'm editing later in the process.

What is the best writing advice that anyone has given you?
Write drunk, edit sober.

What advice would you give to another writer?
Don't be afraid of your first draft. Just write the damn thing. No one's going to see it so it doesn't matter if it's terrible. You go back and fix that later, but if you don't write it in the first place you'll have nothing to work with.

What are your favourite writing sites or blogs that you turn to for help, tips or encouragement?
I like the Badass Writing series and Terrible Minds. I love #1lineWed on Twitter and I belong to a couple writing groups on Facebook. For the most part, though, I read a lot of novels and learn from them. I'd rather spend more time writing than reading about writing.

Besides writing, what else do you enjoy doing? What are your hobbies?
I'm a runner. I sew. I bake gluten-free treats.

What is the best movie you’ve seen this year?
We happen to be back in the U.S. when Jaws was shown in theaters for its 40th anniversary. I'd only ever seen it on television before. It was an entirely different movie on the big screen!

Who is your favourite author?
J.D. Salinger

Where else can we find you online?
Twitter: @StephanieSD
Instagram: @stephanierunnerwriter
Goodreads: Stephanie (and where you can see from my reviews who my current favorite authors are)
Facebook: Stephanie Smith Diamond

This Is Peanut Butter Country

Peanuts are a staple food in West Africa, where they are called groundnuts. Many regions have a groundnut stew to serve up with vegetables and a starch. Here in Bamako the local peanut butter, or pate d'arachide, is sold in buckets in the supermarkets. It's used for making a gravy for meats. In our house it's been made into banana bread and banana muffins, peanut butter cookies (which our housekeeper loved!), and peanut sauce for veggies and tofu.

Cashews are inexpensive here, unlike most of the rest of the world. They are a popular crop in West Africa because the climate is good for growing them and worldwide demand makes them profitable.  Their tasty availability has me anxiously awaiting the arrival of my food processor for cashew cream "cheese," cashew butter, and cashew milk.

I went for my first run in Bamako on Sunday, a short run to familiarize myself with our neighborhood. Right now is the perfect time of year for running outside -- relatively cool and cloudy. Early in the morning there were few cars on the road; on Sunday mornings traffic doesn't pick up until about 10:30. A few children said, "Bonjour!" and one man said, "Courage!" when I ran by, which is what Burundians sometimes yell to runners, also. I feel like I can get a lot of good miles in this town over the next couple years. I'm glad I brought trail runners, even for running on the road. Main roads are paved but the sidewalk, when there is one, is a dirt path that's often covered in rocks and debris. Looking at the photo, I can't remember now if that's a hard-packed dirt road or a paved road that has a layer of dirt on top of it. The red dirt coats everything.

Muffin goes back to school in one week which means I go back to regular running. (I am invoking all the patience and endurance I have learned through yoga and long-distance running to make it through this last week.) And that means we need a lot of food in the freezer for quick meals and snacks. We spent the weekend baking muffins and cookies. We tried our new tortilla press for the first time. We got Indian take-out for the third time in three weeks, just to test it one more time and make sure the leftovers are still delicious. This week will be a busy one for making tortillas, buckwheat crepes, Chebe bread, and more muffins, all for the freezer, and finding the best loaf of local bread for Muffin's peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to hold her over until my bread maker arrives. The shipment with my blender will hopefully arrive this week and I plan on sending my housekeeper out in search of the last mangoes of the season for the freezer, for mango smoothies. Our other food project this week is to seek out the good meat supplier and place an order. We haven't been thrilled with the meat we've been getting from butchers and super-marchés so far.

Happy running and eating this week!

We're Moving to Mali

The title about sums it up.

Our plans have changed from what we thought would be happening last year at this time. But we're happy with the change. I've been tired of the United States for a few months now. I'm certainly done with winter. Muffin asks every day if we're moving back to India. If we're going to Pakistan. If we're going to Chad. If we're going to Mali. She hasn't been in one place for so long without getting on a plane and traveling somewhere (although that changed las week when we went on vacation); she assumes every morning we are waking up early and going to the airport. My aunt told Muffin she has itchy feet and Muffin agreed, although in the sense that her feet are literally itchy because of her winter dry skin.

We haven't even unpacked all the boxes from India yet and my project for the next few months is to decide what goes to Mali and what doesn't. I've already got lists for consumables, for our suitcases, for the air shipment, and for the boat shipment, based on two overseas moves already and on the basic nonavailability of so much stuff in Africa (Mali may have slightly more to offer than Burundi, but I'm not taking any chances).

I've started speaking French to Muffin. We're hoping to enroll her in a preschool program that will prepare her for full-immersion French kindergarden. She doesn't seem to remember any Telegu or Hindi but she is taking to the French very well.

She is so certain that we still live in Hyderabad. I think there's a lot about Mali that will be familiar to her and make her feel at home.

Mike has been working in various African places the last few weeks. He said landing in Africa felt like being home again.

We all have itchy feet that are ready to be back in Africa.

"Let me explain..."

"No, it will take too long. Let me sum up." --Indigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

The fog of moving is lifting. Five weeks ago we left Hyderabad. We spent a week at one parent's house and a weekend at another before moving into our hotel room.

We got new driver's licenses. I had to take a written test and a road test. The road test examiner clearly thought I was a waste of his time; he could have been playing video games on his phone rather than making an experienced driver take a token run around the test course.

We found a place to live and we move into it in one week. We found a preschool for Muffin. I am eagerly awaiting the start of school after Labor Day; Muffin is not. I'm too tired to argue with her about it. I want to get her settled in the new house and new neighborhood first. We've been visiting the nearby playground. I'm setting up play dates with children from her new school so she sees some familiar faces on the first day. Hopefully all those things will help her a bit.

Our first shipment of stuff arrived last week, which was mostly toys for Muffin to help her feel more at home with familiar old things in new surroundings. This morning our furniture from California that was packed into storage in 2008, before we left for Burundi, arrived. We're expecting one more shipment from India and a shipment from a storage facility in Europe to arrive within the next few weeks. I'm not worried about the slow pace. I have no where to put stuff other than my dad's garage, which is now almost full. A couple weeks between shipments means I have time to sort through things rather than be overwhelmed and do nothing. As the old furniture from California was loaded into the garage this morning I was making a mental note of what can go up on Craigslist or Freecycle right away. Mike's away at training and won't be back until after we've moved into the new house. I'm hoping to have the house mostly set up by the time he comes home so the weekend will be a real vacation for him, spending time taking Muffin to the beach and playground, rather than shopping or unpacking boxes. 

And that's about it. I've been working, both paid and volunteer, whenever Muffin takes naps or watches Sesame Street. I've hardly run at all but I'm getting back into it.

I'm starting to feel like I might have some control over life in the near future.

Running, Writing, and Moving

Image from Pinterest.

I don’t really have time for any new projects but I’ve been bitten by the writing bug. Since it’s been so long since this has happened I feel I need to indulge it for a while. I’m working on a book about Burundi. I’m leaning toward nonfiction about our time there but it may end up as fiction based on my experiences. It’s cathartic getting everything out of my head and on “paper.” Reading all my old blog posts and flipping through the books I read before we moved there has brought up a lot of memories, good and bad.

Last week I flew through two 5K runs before my yoga classes. I can get a lot of writing done in my head when I’m zoning out on the treadmill. During our times of internet connection I’m working on our cat’s transportation back to the United States, our up-coming summer holiday trip, and myriad other preparations for our last few months here and our first few in the United States. When the internet isn’t working, I write.

We are getting into that crazed time that happens with every move. Today when I dropped Muffin off at her summer classes, they informed me that her music enrollment is up. I told them the date we’re leaving and they said, “Great, you can do the twelve-week program.” Twelve weeks. I’m not ready to have only three months left.

I kind of want to run outside tomorrow instead of on the treadmill. I should set the alarm now for zero-dark-thirty.

This Week

This week I was interviewed at La Vie Overseas on running abroad.

Travel Photo Friday: Livingstone-Stanley Monument, Bujumbura, Burundi

From the archives. Bujumbura, Burundi, March 2009.

A few kilometers outside of Bujumbura there's a large rock known as the Pierre Livingstone, the Livingstone Rock. It marks the spot where Livingstone and Stanley spent a few days in Burundi as they were passing through the region. It's not where the famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was uttered; that took place in Tanzania a couple weeks earlier. But they both wrote in their journals about the hospitality of the local king and there's some speculation that they stayed for so long because Stanley was suffering from malaria. It's a highly contagious area, but also a nice view to sit and recover by.

View from the monument. We brought a cooler of beers and sodas and enjoyed a drink in the cool breeze.

If you enlarge the photo you can see where they carved their names and the date.

Photo Friday is hosted by DeliciousBaby.com.

Yowling

Every once in a while we hear what we assume to be a cat in heat yowling outside our bedroom window all night long. We don't know what to do about it other than roll over and try to fall back to sleep, annoyed, yet thankful that it's not waking up Muffin. Last night there was yet another cat. Mike and I were both tossing and turning for awhile trying to sleep. At one point it got so frequent and so loud that I thought our cat was yowling back, but she was curled up next to me in bed, also trying to sleep.

Around 4:30 in the morning, at least one tiny little voice joined the chorus of meows.

Great. She had kittens.

We had our share of feral kittens in Bujumbura and any time we tried to help it didn't end well.

Shortly after the sun came up the cats quieted down and we forgot about them. They are still quiet tonight.

I don't want Muffin running up to help every injured or lost animal she sees, because animals are unpredictable and they have diseases. But once she's a little older, I can't see myself teaching her that ignoring crying kittens is an okay thing to do, either. There are just so many of them out in the world beyond the United States, it's exhausting worrying about them all.

Burundi's Biking Bananas!

A friend of ours has created a short film about bikes in Burundi. He and Mike ventured out many times together to trailblaze the mountain biking scene there -- at least, mountain biking as a leisure sport, not as a means of getting your cargo up and down the mountain. Joe's film was shown at the Filmed by Bike international film festival last week in Portland, Oregon.

Check it out! It's a nice little capsule of daily life in Burundi.

Joe's biking his way through Ghana now. You can follow him at his blog Going Ghana.

The Best Coffee in the World

Here's a little note to let you know that the best coffee in the world, Peet's Burundi, is back for a limited time, online only. I'm not just saying it's the best because we lived there and I'm happy when Burundi has great economic opportunities. This really is great-tasting coffee.






Image from Peets.com. I was not compensated in any way for this post. Product was purchased by me for personal consumption.

Weekly SD Blog RoundUp Call for Entries

Meow, the cat's out of the bag now. I'm a State Department blogger, for those readers who know I'm overseas but don't know why. I try to play it cool, focusing on being overseas rather than why we are overseas. But many other SD bloggers have been kind enough to link to me and comment so now it's my turn to repay the favor. I'm hosting the State Department Blog RoundUp this week.

I like the "optional talking point" idea from last week. Here it is: International Bathrooms. Not necessarily in our housing, since housing has been discussed quite a bit lately (although you're certainly free to discuss it some more). I'm thinking more along the lines of the best and worst at the airports and hotels we tend to pass through regularly, funny misunderstandings, etc., and not necessarily limited to your post. Vacation destination bathrooms count too.

For example:

In Poland the bathroom doors are marked with circles and triangles. I used the men's room once and walked into a second men's room before I realized this.

The bathroom stalls in Brussels airport are narrow. At 32 weeks pregnant with my carry-on bag in tow I could not turn around!

The Tribe hotel in Nairobi has an open floor plan, which means the bathtub is in the room and the toilet and shower are behind a glass partition. The Raddisson in Delhi also has glass wall on one side of the bathroom. You have to be really comfortable with your roomie to stay there.

At a particularly nice restaurant in Burundi, I was not startled by the unisex bathroom stall. What startled me was that the men's urinal was installed directly outside that door, with nothing partitioning it from view. I had to walk past a man using it to enter that bathroom. He didn't seem to mind.

Don't get me started on some of the less-than-ideal conditions we faced in Tanzania. My first experience with a hole-in-the-ground bathroom was at a gas station/convenient store outside Moshi. It wasn't until several rest stops later that I realized what the raised blocks on either side of the hole were for.

As noted before, the theme is optional. If you have anything else to share this week, leave me a comment or send me an email. Please let me know by midnight Thursday, U.S. eastern time.

The next few weeks are open for hosting. If you're interested, check out the calendar.

The Wicker District

One of the projects I've been mulling over for awhile is turning our little patch of grass into a family play area.

My first step was to go to a nursery to buy some mosquito-repelling plants. I bought several bunches of what I thought was lemongrass, but now that it's potted and in place I'm not so sure it is. It looks like lemongrass but doesn't smell like it. I also bought what I was told was lavender, even though it doesn't look or smell anything like lavender to me. It's pretty and smells nice though, and it was cheap, so I bought it anyway. I also bought a couple hibiscus plants, just because the flowers were pretty.

Step two was to find some garden furniture. I have a little metal table and I wanted some wicker or rattan chairs to go with it. On the road where the children's hospital is there are several vendors of wicker and rattan furniture so we headed over there and shopped around. I saw the child's size chair first and requested two grown-up sized chairs to go with it. They were unvarnished, but the varnishing could be done in two hours. Muffin and I went home and the driver went back later in the afternoon to pick up our furniture.

The last step was to have the gardener come and do the actual repotting for me. I know it's easy enough to do myself, but I really didn't want to use my precious free time for that task so paying someone ten dollars to do it, plus move the heavy pots into place, was worth it.

Let me go back to the wicker district for a moment. There was some beautiful furniture. It was hard to resist buying more than I actually needed. I could decorate ten outdoor sitting areas. Between the chickens and all the wicker furniture, I'm really missing our big yard in Burundi. But I'm working hard to make sure Muffin has a nice outdoor play area so she doesn't miss out on the playing outside part of childhood.

The Urban, Wild, Farm Animals

One of my criteria for choosing a country to live in is the number of cows or other livestock that wander the streets. The more, the better! I love looking outside to see a cow walking through our upscale, suburban neighborhood. On Saturday morning I heard mooing and I grabbed Muffin to go out and look for the cow. She was hidden by some leaves at first -- our terrace is one floor up from street level -- but Mike managed to get a couple shots of her.

Roadside cows, pigs, and goats charmed me throughout our time in Burundi and I haven't tired of them here, either. I love that I can share them with Muffin now, too. I saw a gorgeous chicken the other day, the nicest I've seen here, and if we had a yard I would have scooped her up and brought her home.

Muffin needs more animal friends to play with.

The Obligatory Year End Roundup

This year we left Burundi after twenty-two months of tropical fun. Sure there were some civil war remnants, but nothing serious enough to make us put down our fresh pineapple juice or stop us from enjoying beautiful sunsets on the terrace. And as one of my coworkers pointed out before I left, we have the greatest souvenir from our time there (see next paragraph).

This year Sophie Olivia came into our lives. It's sounds so cliche (and so does that), but we can't imagine life without her. She's happy and thriving and I can't believe how much she's changed in the first few months of her life. She started eating some real food this week, and with gusto. I'm so anxious to see how she develops further.

Finally, this year we moved to India. So far we are loving it here aside from a few transition pains. We've spent the New Year holiday unpacking, as the remainder of our household items -- aside from the car and the cat -- arrived on Friday afternoon. The New Year isn't much of a holiday here but Mike had yesterday off from work and even though we were tired, unpacking kept us up late enough to see the neighbors set off some fireworks. We'd already unpacked our case of champagne and had a bottle chilling in the fridge for a midnight toast.

We are looking forward to staying in one place for 2011. Cheers to everyone's hopes and dreams for the upcoming year!

Some Shopping, etc.

Pay no attention to the electric hot water heater plugged in below the shower head.

Actually, I can't complain too much about this place. For one thing, it's temporary. Hopefully in two or three weeks we'll be in our permanent house. And despite my fear that the electricity and water will mix in a number of ways--the hot water heater in the shower, the washer and dryer being in a semi-enclosed outdoor cubby, the way the power goes out when it rains--I'm able to thank my lucky stars that we have a good place to live.

Yesterday our driver took Muffin and me to Hyper City, a Target-like store on the outskirts of the main part of the city. We had to drive through some depressing neighborhoods to get there. The cows were living in cement bunkers while the people were living in shacks of corrugated metal with tarps for roofs. Both cows and people were sifting through garbage for food. As depressing as it was, I wasn't hit with the crushing sense I was expecting. Everyone told me the poverty will be unbearable in India. I always respond that I've been living in the third-poorest country in the world so I can probably handle it. Maybe I'm hardened, but I suspect what I saw yesterday wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'll see another time. However, the small bit of urban poverty I've seen here seems worse than the provincial poverty you see in Burundi. Maybe it's the sight of cows eating garbage by the side of the road. Cows are by the side of the road in Burundi, too, but they're eating a fair amount of grass.

Hyper City was hyper indeed. A number of shiny, clean shopping malls have sprung up in Hyderabad and Hyper City is in one of them. All of these big modern malls have metal detectors and on top of that, each person coming in is also wanded. Women have to go behind a little curtain to be wanded by a female security officer. This confused me at the airport, but I'm getting the hang of it now. Once you're in the store, though, you'd never know you weren't in Target or Wal-Mart, especially since there are so many American brands. I wanted to wander around the store and browse, but the driver took my list out of my hands and found everything within a few minutes. I don't know if that was because I'm an expat, a woman, or I had a baby with me, or maybe since it was his first day working for us he wanted to give me a good impression. I loved the efficiency and Muffin needed to get home for a snack and a nap so I appreciated the speed as well. But maybe next time I'll assert myself a little more and do some wandering.

Our first shipment of belongings from the United States arrived last night, much sooner than expected. So we now have another whole room full of stuff to avoid unpacking until we move into our permanent home.

All I need is a nap under a cool fan

I never thought I'd miss the sound of the guards running across the yard to the generator when the electricity went out in Buj. Here, when the power goes out, the concierge busts into the apartment several times to throw switches all over the place. That's much less convenient at ten o'clock at night than waiting for guards to get the generator going.

I know that both in Buj and here we are fortunate enough to have generators that work most of the time. I'm trying to be thankful for what we have. But I'm cranky this morning. The power went out last night just as they were revealing who was going home on Master Chef Australia, one of the few non-Indian tv shows here. It would have been the perfect time to go to sleep, except the concierge kept coming in and out and when the power came back on in the rest of apartment, it stayed off in the bedroom, so the concierge kept coming in and out of that room in particular to flip switches. Eventually the power was back on, which meant the fan was on and the concierge didn't need to come in anymore. I was able to sleep and it felt so good after my sleepless, jetlagged nights. At two in the morning, though, Muffin decided it was time to party. I got her back to sleep at four, laying on top of me, and dozed off again myself only for the two of us to awake in a sweaty mess a couple hours later because the electricity was off again.

Thank goodness the power came on long enough for Mike to make coffee before he left for work.

Delay

Mike's flight out of Buj tonight was cancelled. So rather than waiting for him to arrive on Thursday afternoon, constantly updating the flight status on the websites of the various airlines he was supposed to be flying, I'm waiting for him to find out his new itinerary and let me know what it is. Worst case scenario is he's on the exact same itinerary starting on Thursday night instead of tonight. But I'm hoping he can find an earlier flight because I'm selfish and anxious and ready for him to be home now. (And I know he's ready to be home now, too.)

Pregnancy update: 37 weeks, 3 days. The doctor is confident the baby will wait until Mike's here, even if he arrives Friday or Saturday instead of tomorrow.

Speaking of the Fourth of July

One thing I love about New England is all the history. I remember being in California and seeing "old" towns that were established in the 1800s, thinking that's so young compared to where I grew up. The house I grew up in was older than many states. I've been thinking a lot lately about making sure the baby knows his or her roots, because my own family geneology is part of New England history.

My dad has traced his mother's ancestors back to Plymouth Plantation. At Plymouth they have a replica of the original settlement with actors playing the parts of the settlers and one summer we spent a day there, meeting our ancestor. (He supposedly was eventually asked to leave the settlement due to some shady business deals and being too friendly with Roger Williams, who was the founder of Rhode Island. Even though there's no evidence my ancestor resettled in Rhode Island, I still like to think I'm descended from one of the original Rhode Islanders.) My dad has found the graves of ancestors who fought in King Philip's War and the Revolutionary War.

And it's the Revolutionary War that I'm thinking of today. A couple weeks ago we braved the poison ivy and ticks to visit our war ancestors in the cemetery.

John Gould and Nicholas Gould (click photos for bigger)

We aren't the only country celebrating our independence from colonialism this week. Rwanda and Burundi are too. And July 1 through 3 is also the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. It's a busy week, history-wise.

One Week

One week from right now I'll be at the airport getting ready to board my flight, the first, and the longest, in a series that will have me traveling for approximately thirty hours. I have my cat's reservations made. I've requested aisle seats and gluten-free meals for all my flights. I have my Kindle loaded with plenty of reading material. I've packed quite a few things. I've got detailed lists of the things I want Mike to send to the United States and things that can be forwarded on to India from here when he does our packout.

This week, other than get health certificates for both me and the cat, all I have left to do is say good-bye to everyone. I'm sad. I've had so much fun here and met so many great people. I'm not ready to leave it all behind. And I'm especially sad that Mike's going to miss the next few weeks of the pregnancy. Separations we are used to, but separations while pregnant are all new to us.

The Results Are In

In the election for local councillors on Monday, the ruling party has won by a landslide and eight  opposition parties, including the most popular one, are calling for a re-vote because they hate those results. They are threatening to boycott the rest of the elections this year, including the presidential election in June.

Opposition Demands Re-run Over Fraud Claims

Ruling Party Takes Big Lead

Mike's been gone the last couple days, observing the election and the ballot counting in one of the districts a couple hours away from the city. He returned yesterday. He said that there were some kids hassling people and it was one of the hottest afternoons he'd experienced here, but overall the voting process was smooth, if a bit messy. The ink pots that people dipped their thumbs in to prove they voted proved to be the biggest disaster of the day. The ink was thick and sticky, and people were caught outside trying to wash the ink off, but in reality they were just trying to wipe off enough inky gloop so that they didn't leave sticky, inky fingerprints on everything they touched for the rest of the day. Mike didn't even vote and he got ink all over his hands just from hanging around polling stations.