A Jolt, a Bolt, and Jodi Picoult

***Announcement***

Tomorrow on my blog I will be hosting author Danette Haworth. She will be talking about her new book, Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning, and she will be giving away a free copy of it to a random winner who comments on the post tomorrow! So please stop by for a chance to win her fantastic book!

What do I miss since I became pregnant almost nine months ago? Hmmm... Starbuck's Mint Frappuccino, deli meat, wine, and being graceful. Most days it's not too hard to get by without these things, but when nights have been an endless flip flop full of aching hips, restless legs, and my toddler's cries, I desperately crave a jolt. In particular, I want caffeine in the form of an icy cold minty frappuccino. So what's a pregnant writer-mama to do in order to switch my brain on, so I can write from 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. and from noon to 1 p.m. without taking a nap?

I muddle through the day, trying to conserve my energy. I play with my daughter in her highschair as long as she'll let me. I give in to movie time, letting her watch 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. (I have the entire Mary Poppins movie memorized now.) I let her get dirty and wet outside if it means not having to run down the street after her. And somehow, being outside is the key.

Now that Spring is here, the fresh aroma of flowers, the sticky gunk of pollen, and the passionate tweets of mating birds all help to awaken my mind. Tomorrow's guest on my blog, Danette Haworth, has some very thought-provoking ideas about the powers of nature in our lives and in our writing. Stop by my blog tomorrow to discover how a bolt of lightning can be a powerful force in one girl's life. Although we may not spend as much time outdoors as our parents and grandparents did when they were children, nature still shapes who we are and how we feel.

We try to control so much in our world, but nature is still one force that has a mind of its own (thank goodness). We may cling to it, we may run from it. We may seek it out, we may push it away. As a writer and a mother, I now appreciate it even more for the sake of my child's future as well as for using it in my writing to open the window for children today who spend much of their time inside wrapped up with technology.

Sometimes I feel uncertain where the fate of humans is headed when I see our absorption with technology and the Internet, hear about potentially catastrophic events like Swine Flu and near misses from asteroids, and watch trees vanish under bulldozers and children search for even a small square of earth to play with. My uncertainty easily spins into fear when I am going on little sleep deprived of a small caffeine fix. I want the best future possible for my daughter and my baby who is soon to be born.

But certainty does rest in the words of Jodi Picoult, whose answer to the question "In our world of uncertainty, what do you know beyond a doubt is true?" is "Love. Especially between a mother and a child." And this is why being a writer-mama is the biggest jolt of my life.