I'm watching my husband spackle our kitchen ceiling. It's a new beginning for our kitchen, a new beginning five years in the making. But it comes on the heels of mass destruction just one state over in Oklahoma City, where tonight parents are wondering where their babies are. It's not fair. All I could think all afternoon is that it's not fair Chateau Travolta is still standing. We had a tornado watch all day. What leaves, what stays: It's not fair. My daughter fears the tornados. She has trouble falling asleep in the midst of a heavy thunderstorm. I remember feeling that way as a child, living in a house my parents built on the footprint of another house destroyed in a tornado, as if the same thing couldn't happen twice. Surrender, Dorothy. But we live here, in the Midwest, in the land of extreme weather, of pop-up storms where the warm winds of the Gulf of Mexico kiss the winds of Canada on a fairly regular basis. We live here, and we hope. But whether or not our homes are torn asunder, there is one guarantee: It's not fair. Tornadoes have shaped my faith. We all need grace, because in the land of dust storms and redemption, nothing is as it seems, and no amount of clean living can save you from the cold front meeting the warm front and dancing. You may live another day, you may lose your house, you may lose everything. Or you may not. It's not fair, and it's not even predestined. It's just ... there. And so, tonight, my heart breaks for Oklahoma City and its suburbs. I'm so sorry. It's not fair. And I love you all. I wish there were some way I could do more. Continue reading

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. Continue reading

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. Continue reading

When we moved to Chateau Travolta in 2008, the housing market was on the verge of tanking. Then it tanked, and the For Sale signs started popping up like dandelions. Some of those houses took years to sell, which made me realize just how stupid it was to take on two mortgages at once when we sold This Old House to move here. This week there are ladders all over my neighborhood, as the houses built in 1978 have begun to show their age. Shingles pushed well beyond their limits topple from roofs. The boards on the sides of houses are torn away and replaced. The aluminium ladders sparkle in the May sunshine. As I jogged past a pile of boards pocked with bent nails, I started thinking about the kitchen remodel I've not blogged about. It's not that I'm not proud of it -- I am -- it's so pretty -- but I really only feel comfortable blogging home improvements we did with our own little hands, and though the demolition was difficult and Beloved has been moonlighting as a drywall installer, a plumber and an electrician for the past two months while I just took a crowbar and pried off floor tiles and anything else that pissed me off, for some reason, I just didn't want to blog about it because there were so many parts we paid someone else to do, and then for some reason that feels braggy in a way "look at the pocket door Beloved installed" doesn't. This may be justified only in my head. Or worrying about bragging in a Pinterest world may be ridiculous. Or I may be a huge hypocrite because I brag about my writing here (or at least that's what the About Me page feels like, but dude, I'm... Continue reading

It's Children's Book Week! Yay! And to celebrate, I'm giving away a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME and joining a bunch of other great authors and bloggers on a blog hop. (Although teens aren't really "children," YA falls in this category.) In order to enter to win, please fill out the form below. Also! If you want to read THE OBVIOUS GAME but don't have a book budget, don't forget to ask your library to order it. Or if you just want to be nice, ask your library to order it. I'm not afraid to beg you to ask your library to order it. All you have to do is go up to the librarian (check to make sure the library doesn't already have it, of course), and ask them to order it! Aren't libraries fantastic? Don't forget high school libraries! And then, once you asked your library to order it, email me at ritajarens(at)gmail.com and I'll send you a signed book plate for your troubles. Loading... Continue reading

Last week, I attended the RT Booklover's conference in Kansas City. I wasn't sure what to expect, as it's primarily a conference for romance novelists, and I quit Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star, because there was too much sex. I'm not much of a romance reader. But, wow, there are a lot of romance readers, and they read a lot of books, so all hail anyone who's supporting authors, right? This guy? Is a romance novel cover model (Band Name of the Day) and Mr. RT 2009, or so he reported when I insisted he flex while hugging fellow author Jen from People I'd Like to Punch in the Throat. At the welcome party, I noticed a bunch of very fit-looking men walking around with tshirts that said Men of Romance. I asked around only to find a) people like Fabio really exist and b) they are super into being cover models. And some of them are actually 6'3" Adonis-types in real life, too. CRAZY! I always thought, I guess, that those people were drawings. Examples of cover models. Never wearing shirts. Never, never, never wearing shirts. At Club RT, a venue in which authors were supposed to sit so readers could find them (I never did see one reader and would not recommend participating -- I sat with plenty of better-known-and-actual-correct-genre authors and they didn't get many readers, either), I met new adult author Lynne Tolles, who packed her own blood in werewolf, vampire, zombie and demon varieties. She was really nice despite having so much blood on her person. I brought bookplates. Que horor. For some reason, the "A" authors were separated from the rest of the expo by a chasm of shiny cement. It is not at all intimidating to be sitting around with 299 other authors hoping... Continue reading

Podcast is here -- talking all about Listen to Your Mother! Continue reading

The Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show is this Saturday, May 11, at 7 pm at Unity Temple on the Plaza. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. Unless you win two here. Now that my conference is over, I'm starting to get really nervous for the show. I've heard all my castmates' performances, and they are both hilarious and heartbreaking. If you're local, I highly recommend the show, and not just because a portion of the proceeds go to the Rose Brooks Center. What is Listen to Your Mother, you ask? It's a group of women performing essays on motherhood, daughterhood and what it means to participate in this part of the human condition. The show will be around ninety minutes, and afterwards I promise you will leave a changed person for what you have heard. I'll also be selling and signing my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME, and my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, afterward. I'm reordering bookplates so hopefully they will be in by then. If you have a copy and you just want a signature, bring it on down. Some of my castmates will be selling their books, as well, so if you're interested, please bring small bills. Most of us aren't equipped with debit card thingies. So! If you want to win a pair of tickets, please leave a comment here. Every comment counts as one entry. I'll close entries on this Thursday, May 9 at 5 pm CT. I hope to see you at Unity Temple on Saturday! Continue reading

The reason I haven't been here on the blog this week is because I've been at RT Booklovers Conference, this year held in Kansas City. As many of you know, I live here, and I decided to attend because my budget to support THE OBVIOUS GAME is near nothing, and an authors' conference in my hometown is a benefit that fell in my lap. So I've taken almost a week off, and I went. Today I met up with Jen from People I Want to Punch in the Throat, my new friend and fellow castmate of the upcoming Kansas City Listen to Your Mother Show (I'll be giving away two free tickets starting Monday, stay tuned if you're local). I had to leave the conference for a few hours to attend the funeral of a dear friend's mother, who unexpectedly died on the operating table last week. When I returned, I asked Jen where she was. She told me she was going to listen to a panel on craft by a man I'd never heard of, David Morrell, who writes a number of things, including Rambo. I have almost zero interest in thrillers or Rambo, but David Morrell changed my life. In an extremely intense hour, he described what it is that makes writers stand out from the noise. How we find our own distinct voice. And that is, according to Morrell, to ask ourselves which stories only we can write. As Morrell described his childhood, my heart went out to him, as it does to anyone who has a rough childhood. Childhood should be a magic time, and despite my mother's cancer when I was a child, my childhood was good. I was loved, and I knew it. Morrell didn't have quite as idyllic of an experience, but he... Continue reading

It's the fifth anniversary of the publication of my parenting anthology, SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, this year, and so in honor of Mother's Day coming up, I rang up two of my contributors -- Alice Bradley and Eden Kennedy -- who went on to write their own parenting tome, LET'S PANIC ABOUT BABIES. We decided what might be really fun to do in a veiled attempt to remind you our books make excellent Mother's Day gifts for the lovelies in your life is update you on one of our vignettes from SIFTW and ponder which bit of baby advice from LPAB works for tweens, which we all now have. SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK, Edited by Rita Arens -- buy it here! I'm going to update my essay, "Sleep Cycles." (p. 25) Originally I included these stages of adult sleep cycles: 1) Alcohol-induced 2) Insomnia-Related 3) The Love Bug 4) New Baby-Induced 5) Toddler-Induced. Clearly, I had a toddler when I wrote this post. There are all sorts of other reasons you can't sleep after becoming a parent. My daughter is now nine. Since the Toddler-Induced days, I've also experienced the following sleep disturbances: 6) Growing-Child-in-My-Bed-Induced. My daughter has slept through the night since she was around four or five. It was a gradual thing, when the waking up and crying three times a night became waking up and walking into my bedroom once a night to try to crawl in where it was warm. At first, I gave in (it was always my side of the bed she approached, of course) and let her crawl in, only to find her elbow in my ear, her bony butt in my hip and the amount of body heat with me in the middle unable to crawl out from under the... Continue reading

So for the past two weeks I have had the my-diamond-shoes-are-pinching-my-feet problem of a kitchen remodel. We've been in Chateau Travolta for five years, and this baby has been a long time coming. For the past two weekends, Beloved and I have ripped out soffits, torn out cabinets and nearly severed our hot water pipe (on accident, that last one). We've also had much use of the world's most fun tool, the fubar. Now that we've found the linoleum under our linoleum and chiseled away the offensive tile in the foyer, the rebuild began this morning when the cabinet guys arrived. And listen, I can handle the barely veiled disdain and the insinuation that I might be more concerned with the color of screws than weight distribution, but the belching. One of these guys has belched 17 times in the past five hours, and he was gone for a while for lunch. None of the other guys has said a word. Are they so accustomed to his extra air that they don't notice it anymore? Or is this part of the trade-off? No office politics, you can belch whenever you want, but you might end up arthritic early from the manual labor? I'm thinking of Office Space, clearly, but is it real? I know plenty of people who work with their hands, and I can't imagine them walking into someone's house while they are there and belching every four seconds. Please tell me it's just this guy. Continue reading

That is all. Continue reading

Yesterday, I went over to Erin Margolin's house to do a practice run-through of the Kansas City Listen to Your Mother show. Basically there are somewhere near a dozen of us, and we're all performing a short essay we wrote about motherhood, daughterhood or some mix of the two. Before we started, Co-Director Laura Seymour was all, "Hey, is anyone good at opening champagne?" I've worked at four restaurants and a dog track. So I was all, "I AM." There was nervous tittering, because let's face it -- most of us didn't know each other and we were in someone's basement drinking champagne and preparing to expose our innermost secrets in preparation for taking the entire show live in a few weeks. WHAT'S TO BE NERVOUS ABOUT? So there I was, test-driving my new gray-and-orange-striped-Calvin-Klein-from-Marshall's dress that is super-crazy tight but also super-crazy comfortable, my jacket to hide my nervous-armpit-sweating habit and my Kanye mail-order-discount glasses. The last five champagne bottles I've opened have had a pop, but I've always been able to hold onto the cork. If I didn't know Erin better, I'd suspect her of shaking this bottle all the way home from Costco, because when I opened it, the cork shot out of my hand and the champagne came spraying out so fast I was covered in it, down to my dripping glasses, in nanoseconds. It was champagne hubris, y'all. It's fortunate that I have an extremely high tolerance for making an ass of myself, because I was COVERED in champagne. My right armpit smelled like New Year's Eve 1998. Still, I cleaned myself up and sipped a little of that champagne while I listened to a bunch of new friends read some truly amazing essays. I laughed, I cried, I wore champagne with pride. Our show... Continue reading

The little angel and I popped some tags last night. Want to see what I got? Continue reading