Jessica Scott

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe other writers poised with their toes on the ledge of their first book launch are able to do something besides study the horizon. I’ve tried, but I’m failing. Maybe I should say falling?

and Falling, Fly, my debut dark fantasy novel, pits the fallen angel of desire, now a vampire, against a self-medicating neuroscientist in the Irish, steampunk-inflected Hotel of the Damned. I started writing it three years ago, fairly confident it was too weird to sell, but, needing to wrestle with my relationship to desire, and who better to teach me than its angel?

It wasn’t an easy book to write. When I finished, I started working on a second manuscript that I intended as a more mainstream, hopefully more saleable endeavor. I entered and Falling, Fly in contests, because I’d learned so much from contest feedback on my first (and now properly buried) manuscript, and I watched with some concern as Deus Inversus (the working title for book two, now called In Dreams Begin) got progressively weirder.

Then, almost a year in, just as Ida Jameson – Irish whiskey heiress, member of the Golden Dawn, and my erstwhile heroine – began taking on a distinctly wicked sheen, a final-round contest judge called with an offer on and Falling, Fly. With barely an audible “click,” I dropped into the alternate, parallel space-time of publishing. Suddenly I had agents to call, extensions to plead for, decisions to make, and documents to sign. When I landed again in the so-slow-it-appears-motionless parallel, I had a savvy, hungry, clever agent (Holly Root) and a two-book deal with an incisive, smart and organized editor at Berkley (Leis Pederson). And I was a little out of breath.

Then nothing happened.

For almost a year.

There have been a few hops across into the ‘everything-at-once’ track since – editing deadlines, short-notice opportunities to create a PowerPoint deck for a cover conference, appeals to certain luminaries for advance blurbs – but for the most part, I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half happily plodding along the well-worn channels of ‘Publishing Slow-Time’, which all aspiring writers tread until some otherwise indistinguishable cog of an query letter or conference pitch session engages, and drops them into the whirlwind.

But now I’m listening to the gears. I know it’s coming. My book launches March 2. I can hear a hum revving up beside me. And I’ve completely lost my ability to keep marching along. I’m poking my head over the parapet – checking Amazon rankings, and Googling my book title in case Google Alerts misses something, and rechecking my inbox – trying to climb the walls and get a peek at what’s coming.

I have no idea what it will be like. I’ve never done anything like this before. The closest experience I have is back in my misspent youth, when I was part of an experimental theater company.

Opening night would come, and the cast I’d worked with for months would gather in the green room. As director, it was my job to give the actors a final “you’re ready for this, you are all amazing” speech. I loved doing it. We’d all hug, and they would all leave. My actors would all go on stage. And I’d pace underneath it, listening for the laughs, the applause at the act break, the lobby conversations at intermission, the length of curtain calls. Helpless to *do* anything anymore, trusting my actors, doubting myself, opening the after-show wine earlier than necessary to have it poured for toasts.

Except it took two hours, pep talk to curtain call; March 2 is thirty-five days away, and I can’t really pace and drink for that long. Publishing in general, and particularly right now, feels less like theater and more like a benign version of a description I once read of a soldier’s experience: days of boredom broken by seconds of terror; and I thought, “Who better to talk with about waiting than Jess?”

Any pointers, my friend? Anybody else?

I have one galley left (OK, actually two, but I’m keep the last one), and I’ll give away to the first person who can provide the (wonderfully apt) title to the Vietnam novel I paraphrased above.

Ready? Leap!

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As you might have seen on Twitter, I received an invite to be part of PBS’s POV blog and their discussion on women in the military. I’m thrilled to be a part of this, which is sure to help shape the debate about women in combat and women in the military en masse. I hope to help educate the public about what its really like being a woman in the military.

This is a huge responsibility and one that I take very seriously. While I have my opinions, I also know that my opinions are looked at by the public at large. I hope everyone remembers that everything I’ve posted have been my own words and thoughts and in no way represent army policy.

I’m really excited about this opportunity and as soon as I get more information, I’ll be sure to pass it along. Thank you all so much for your support over the last year and in the coming months!

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Thanks to everyone who helped me get on board for the Army Wife’s Network!

I think this is the podcast! I’m up right after Susan Vogt. I’d love to hear what you think. This is my first ever live interview, so it was pretty exciting!!

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People think of Twitter as that little bird icon on people’s websites or a small blue T but if you don’t use it, you might be confused as to what it is. For an author, it can be a crucial tool or make you look like one.

Think of Twitter as a stream. If you have an account, you’re at least standing on the side of it. If you pop in periodically to announce that you’ve done this or that, you are, at best, standing on the shore, throwing rocks into it. This is not a way for you to gain followers or to fully exploit that which Twitter is.

To maximize your social networking time, you need to fully dive into the Twitter stream and that means entering the conversation. How do you find people to follow? I went to people I knew of, such as @Smartbitches and @deirdreknight to see who they were following. I looked for people who were industry folks, not friends of theirs, though in some cases they were probably the same and I followed them. Then I repeated the same for other folks, expanding the network of people who I follow. It’s a wide web but when someone, say, @laurakinsale followed me, I about fell out of my chair. It’s a small thing, but it’s pretty cool from a fangirl perspective.

Twitter etiquette is that is someone follows you, you should follow them back. I don’t auto follow. There are also bots out there that auto follow everyone then you somehow end up tweeting blow job links to little kids in Brazil, which is Not. Cool. Or legal but that’s another discussion. So you have to watch your followers and block the spammers (though for the life of me, I can’t figure out why people twitter spam).

Once you have a list of folks you follow, pay attention. Read it. Yes, this is a time suck, which is why I do not have a twitter client installed on my laptop. I only use Twitter on my iPhone because when I sit down to work, it’s time to work and keeping it on my iPhone is one way of keeping my usage under control. Though I’m approaching 4000 tweets so whether it’s in control or not is up for discussion.

But Twitter isn’t always about me and if you’re on it, you know the authors who only show up to promote their book. This is not a good way to maximize your time because you’re only having one part of the conversation. The part about you. After a while, people will stop listening. Some authors have huge fan bases and people will follow regardless. But to truly have impact, you have to converse and that means retweeting. The Retweet means that you take someone else’s tweet about them or something other than you and pass it along. I routinely look for my fav author’s stuff and pass them along. If I see someone say something great about a book I enjoyed, I pass it along. Same goes with good news. Make Twitter about the stream and the people around you and people will notice and follow you.

That’s not to say that I don’t have my wordpress blog set up to automatically tweet when I have a new post. You still have to tell people your good news and hope they’ll pass it along. It goes a long way if you’ve done the same for others in the past. I try to maximize the social networking time I do have and so I have almost everything tied in together, so my blog and twitter both feed to facebook.  Which is another drawback to Twitter. If you feed into your facebook, you still need to take care of that page, too. But that will be part 3.

Being social means talking about other than yourself. Follow people and they will follow you back. Or maybe not. I don’t unfollow people who don’t follow me because then I miss out on what they’re saying and then I’d be missing part of the conversation.

And the conversation works because once more, I look for common tweeters. Fellow twitter users have entered onto my keeper book shelf because I discovered their stuff through twitter and I might not have learned about them otherwise. But it’s about the conversation. About getting in and making about something other than yourself. And if you’re not on twitter in the conversation, you may be missing the point.

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I can’t say this week has been easy. It hasn’t. But I’m starting to wonder just what y’all think is going on here. Monday night, I was in tears. I laid awake, bawling because of the strain of my husband moving to Ft Bragg without us and a myriad of other worries and stresses that decided Monday night was the night to let it all out.

The night kicked off with my oldest coming back from a sleepover. She was over tired and hungry, cause you know that child won’t eat. She wailed and cried for three hours STRAIGHT. We finally got her to sleep and then the little one wouldn’t settle down. For children used to going to bed at 730, 10pm was insanely late.

But the crying, over tired kids was only the start. It really hit me that my husband is moving to Bragg. No biggie, right? Yeah, except that he’s at Bragg and the girls and I won’t get there until January of 2011 because I’m going to my advance course. We’ll make it work, we always do, but pressing on my chest that night was the dread that my daughters could be without their daddy for 3 YEARS. Because what if we get to Bragg and then he deploys. Really? This is the choice we have to make?

I’m not blaming the army here. I accept that ‘needs of the army’ trumps needs of a family any day of the week (notice I said accept, doesn’t mean I like it). But when the people on high look down at the micro level, at the individual soldier and say, well, sometimes you’ve got to take one for the team, I feel like saying…well, it’s not fit for the public but use your imagination.

The reality of it is that my husband has not officially moved from Ft Hood since 2003. Nevermind that he’s done 3 COMBAT TOURS in Iraq in that time period, plus his advanced schooling so he’s been physically at Ft Hood less than 24 months out of that entire time period. I, on the other hand, have moved because of my officer training.

The army says, you have dwell time. Well, what good does dwell time do when you move someone 90 days after they return from Iraq and you don’t consider that he is part of a family with children. 3 schools in the first year of kindergarten? So no, I have to stay in Hood until summer time.

I’m not telling you this to demand you write to the powers that be or anything like that. This is our situation and we’ll deal with it, just like we always have. I’m sharing this because sometimes, the magnitude of the impact on my kids gets to me. I keep telling myself that they’ll be allright. They’re with me, we’ll get by. But they love their daddy. And you know what? I love their daddy and damn it, I don’t want to spend 2 years without him.

So it hurts to be faced with these choices. It hurts a lot but these are the consequences of our continuing to serve. And sometimes, the consequences and the weight of it all keeps me up at night, letting it all out, so I have space to put it back inside and get through the next day.

So that’s it. A night in the life of a worried soldier, mom and wife who’s no longer in combat, but sometimes, just as worried.

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Today, I’m guest blogging over at Riding with the Top Down. Please stop by!

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I’m going to respond to this article, paragraph by paragraph and do my best to keep the emotion out of my response. My responses to each paragraph are offset. Here is the original link to the post http://www.kstatecollegian.com/mobile/opinion/enlisted-women-should-be-required-to-take-birth-control-1.2135616

Enlisted women should be required to take birth control

By Karen Ingram

Hannah Loftus

Let me tell you a story about two former soldiers I know.

The first one is a tiny thing, four inches shorter than me, but she did two tours in Iraq, and she is one of the toughest human beings I know.

The second one was sent to Afghanistan, and I could tell by the way she moaned about how she didn’t want to go that she would not be gone long. Sure enough, she returned within a couple of months, pregnant.

These women are depictions of women across the service. I do not deny that there are women out there who do get pregnant to get out of deployment, just like there are men who come up with excuses to get out of deployment. Contrary to this author’s belief, men have a myriad of excuses not to deploy, from faking PTSD to alcohol and drug abuse to financial and family problems. Each individual command determines who deploys and who doesn’t based of individual reasons.

A number of women soldiers who get deployed to places like Iraq or Afghanistan get sent home early because they become pregnant … while they’re over there.

Again, true. Women do get pregnant in the combat zone but where are your numbers? I can tell you in my brigade, there were less than 10 women sent home from the combat zone last year. In a force of nearly 4000, we’re talking about 10 soldiers. There were significantly more men sent home from the fight and not for injuries.

Women are necessary in the military. For example, when patting down suspects to check for weapons, they need women to pat down the women. When a large percentage of the women soldiers get knocked up and sent home early, this creates a negative impact on the rest of the soldiers. In response to this problem, Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo issued an order on Nov. 4 stating that any soldier involved in a war-time pregnancy, male or female, could be subject to court martial. As of yet, this rule has not been enforced, but it’s still made many people cry foul.

I absolute agree that all soldiers are critical to the fight, however, you state that a ‘large percentage’ of females get knocked up and sent home early. Where are your numbers to indicate that a large percentage of females are sent home early. Can you point to specific facts to back your statement up? Because I would be interested in seeing the numbers myself.

Four Democratic Senators, all of them women, wrote a letter to Cucolo asking him to rescind that order on Dec. 22, saying, “We can think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished for conceiving a child.”

Talk about missing the point. These women are not getting pregnant while on home soil with plenty of time to spare before deployment; they are using pregnancy as an excuse to neglect their duties as soldiers in war zones. Either right before they are deployed, or as soon as they set foot over there, they sleep around to intentionally get pregnant so they can leave early. Many capable women soldiers, such as the one I mentioned earlier, face prejudice and ridicule from men because these deserters are giving women soldiers a bad name.

When, on home soil, is a good time to get pregnant? Unless you get pregnant the day you get home from deployment, you will still miss out on some of the next deployment when you have a baby. In most combat brigades, the average time at home station is 12 months and during that twelve months, these brigades are resetting and training for the next deployment. In my brigade, for example, we had exercises from July straight through until October, when we loaded our equipment on the trains for Iraq. So you state there is plenty of time for females to have babies, but the operational tempo in active duty combat brigades simply doesn’t provide for the kind of time you suggest is available.

The fact is, even in the 90s, when the OPTEMPO was significantly less than it is today, women were given a hard time for having children. In my nearly fifteen years experience, there has never been a good time in the army to have babies. Punishing women is not the answer.

And who could blame the men for being angry for women using pregnancy as an excuse to desert their duties? That isn’t fair. The men have no such cop-out available to them unless they desert. Why shouldn’t women deserters be punished, too?

Men have lots of reasons to get out of deployment. In fact, when commanders are looking at personnel, they fully expect that 10% of the total force available will not deploy. That number is even greater now because of the strain on the force due to back to back deployments.

If women wish to join the military, they must be just as willing to go to war for their country as any man. Women cannot expect to have equal rights with men if they use reproduction as an excuse to get out of their duties. Women can join the military and have children, but when they are in combat zones, the only thing they should be doing is their job as soldiers. Separate but equal is not equal.

You state that separate but equal is not equal. I agree with you. However, having nearly 15 years in the active duty army, I can tell you that most of our soldiers are willing to deploy, male and female. People that are not willing to deploy simply get out of the military and my response to them is thank you for serving. But you miss a key point: every unit will have a rear detachment because there will always be soldiers who cannot deploy. Because a female chooses to have a baby does not mean she cannot contribute to the war effort in some way, just as men who are on rear detachment support the warfighters downrange.

I agree with you one hundred percent, however, when you state that when in a combat zone, the only thing they should be doing is soldiering. In Utopia, that would be the case but ignoring the fact that when men and women get together, there will always be hormones flying does nothing to address the reality of men and women deploying. Pretending that sex won’t happen is idealistic and unrealistic.

Unfortunately, the older I get, the more realistic and cynical I have become. I realize that no matter how much you try to explain to them that they are doing more harm than good for women’s rights by copping out on the menfolk, they won’t listen. They’ll cry and moan about their rights to breed, totally neglecting the fact that they are, first and foremost, soldiers.

You paint every single female soldier with the brush of coping out. Guess what? Thousands and thousands of women have deployed, many multiple times. Some of us have had babies and then deployed. You miss the point when you say that we are all coping out by wanting to be able to have families. And women’s rights is about the ability to choose, not about the ability to be just like a man. If nothing else, the fact that women can have children and still serve on active duty is major step forward for women’s rights, not the other way around. Providing role models for young women and showing them they can do anything and still have a family is a stronger example than punishing women for having babies. The punishment factor is another way that people who are against women’s rights continue to push women out of the public domain. Finding a way to balance the two is significantly better than saying you as a woman can only do one or the other.

Last time I checked, a soldier’s body was not his or her own. Legally, it’s government property, which means the government dictates to a soldier what they can and cannot do with his or her body. While this policy has resulted in some very unfortunate incidents, such as the Edgewood experiments, it is supposed to ensure that soldiers are regulated so they can perform their duties as needed.

So Depo has no side effects? No weight gain that the female would be punished for, no emotional side effects? The army should be able to inject me with whatever they see fit? In that case, let’s sign up a brigade for experimental vaccines against AIDS. Or the flu. Force protection is not the same thing as forced injections.

So, since I can’t talk sense into the people who signed up for the job, I have a suggestion for their boss instead: Change the policy. Instead of punishing soldiers for war-zone pregnancy, make it mandatory for all women soldiers to be on birth control. And not just any birth control; make sure it’s Depo-Provera, a type of birth control given by injection. If we can’t rely on women soldiers to keep their pants on, we can’t rely on them to take a pill every day, now can we? Not to mention the fact that, for the legitimate women soldiers, being in a combat zone isn’t the best place to remember to take a pill every single day. The Depo-Provera shot, on the other hand, is only needed once every three months. Every soldier is required to get a dozen shots before they go over there anyway, so just add this to their round of inoculations. Problem solved.

The army does not have the right to tell me when I can or cannot have a family. They do not do that to male soldiers, ergo they cannot do that for female soldiers. I just returned from a combat zone where I was deployed with my husband. Guess what? I remembered to take my pill every single day. For you to break female soldiers down into legitimate and not-legitimate soldiers simply shows that you have no idea how the military works. You are simply attacking women who wish to have families and still serve their country. You uphold negative stereotypes of women, that every woman who gets pregnant is doing so to get out of a deployment and that simply is untrue. Some women simply wish to have a family. You also state that enlisted women should be required to take Depo. What about officers? Should they? Or do you even know the difference between officers and enlisted?

I have much respect for all soldiers. I come from a military family myself. If some women demand to be treated as equally as the men, but use excuses to cop out of doing their duty, I say we beat them to the punch and prevent them from doing so by making Depo-Provera mandatory while they are stationed in combat zones. If the chances of a woman soldier becoming pregnant while in combat were basically eliminated by doing so, their fellow soldiers might feel they can count on them more. A soldier in combat has only one duty, and that is to be a soldier, no matter which gender.

I completely disagree with you here and I don’t believe you have respect for all soldiers. The tone of your piece is completely disrespectful toward female soldiers en masse and shows a lack of respect for our military in general. Our soldiers are part of a team, irrespective of gender. Females serving in units are respected and serve with dignity. This war has proven that women are capable of serving in combat with distinction. You state that separate but equal is not equal but targeting women with birth control when you do not target males with the same thing is not equal. Also, what about the men who are sleeping with women over there? Are they blameless? Should they be forced to be injected with something as punishment for getting these women pregnant.

I have no problem discussing the way forward for females to serve in the military and I do not deny that some women do get pregnant to get out of service. But to state that all women do so is a disservice and clouds the discussion with baseless accusations. You present no facts in your piece, nor do you back up any of your statements with numbers. You act like Depo is the answer for this and it simply is not. The army is actually loathe to give out Depo as the birth control of choice because of the myriad of side effects, some of which can be severe.

I welcome the discussion about women in the military but saying we are all tramps who can’t be trusted to keep our legs closed is not the way to go about leading the conversation.

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It’s been stressful these last few days. The oldest didn’t want to go to school because she was being referred to as ‘the new girl’. Then, to top it off, she hasn’t eaten dinner in like five days now. She has to at least try everything, which she’s doing but a single bite of lasagna that she spits out isn’t really going to hold her until morning. But I refuse to be a short order cook and I refuse to make peanut butter and jelly for dinner. So we’re working through that, but as a result of her not eating, the littlest daughter is skipping dinner.

The end result of skipping dinner? Bed time is an absolute nightmare and mornings are even more fun. They’re hungry, they’re tired and they’re not even close to enjoyable. So at the end of my mind, I called my friend Tamara, who’s also just back from a deployment. I needed help. I needed to confess what was going on and ask how the heck is she doing it.

You know what she told me? She said you need to wake up every morning, and pray and be grateful. You have today to love those little girls and be with them. You need to ask for help with being patient and just be grateful that you have today with them. She really got me with that one. Tamara knows me. We went through Officer Candidate School together and each of us dealt with missing our kids and we’ve helped each other through our respective deployments. When our daughters saw each other at school, they were so happy to see each other.

That’s the kind of friend you need at a time like this. At a time when you’re ready to pull your hair out, instead you sit on the bathroom floor and talk through it. You can talk about what’s really bothering you and your friend will tell you to pull yourself up and get over it. If you don’t like it, change it.

So I did. The next morning, I rolled out of bed and made a change. No more yelling. Getting down on their levels. Smiling and hugging instead of worrying about being late. Enjoying the fact that I’m home, that I have my daughters back and, surprise, they still love me and my husband.

And it worked. Last night, no major out bursts. No yelling. This morning, there were tears, but for the most part, we got through it with hugs and smiles.

You wouldn’t think that coming home would be that stressful. You’d think it would be a panacea of happiness. It is but it also isn’t. There’s no one here to run interference for Scott and I, except each other. The best part about our year in Iraq was the fact that we grew closer as a couple and are able to talk through stuff that before, we’d argued about.

So the challenges continue with our coming home and I’m sure they’ll keep on. But at the end of it all, I spent a year longing for this. I will appreciate today, because I might not have tomorrow.

Thank you, Tamara, for being the friend to tell me straight and let me lean on you.

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Three weeks ago, I became a mom again. I walked into my mother’s foyer, greeted to cries of ‘mommy, mommy’ and hugged my daughters close for the first time in over six months.

In that moment, I was mom again. I know that sounds off. Just because I deployed didn’t mean I wasn’t a mom, I was just gone. In my heart and soul, I still worried about my kids, I still missed them. But I didn’t have the day to day things that make me mom in my kids’ world.

When my husband deployed both times before this tour, each time, he came home to little strangers. Our oldest was three months old the first time he came home. She didn’t know him but she adjusted easily. Our youngest, though, was a year old before he came home the second time and their relationship has never been quite the same as his relationship with our oldest.

My husband has never had to sit back and watch his child crawl toward another woman, saying ‘mama,mama’. They might not have known him but they’d never replaced him in their hearts.

I have. When I left for officer candidate school, my youngest was just shy of seven months old. I was in Fort Benning, GA, my kids were in Maine and my husband was in Iraq. It was my first taste of what life in the army as a mom was truly like but I had no idea how hard it was going to be to deploy and come home again. I knew my mom was taking great care of my kids. I was not prepared for my baby to crawl after her, calling her mama. In that moment, I had a taste of the true heart break that military moms go through.

I’ve always been an emotional parent. But this week when I took my oldest daughter to her first day at school, she clung to me, sobbing that she didn’t want me to leave her. It was only school but in her world, it might as well have been another year. She cried. I cried. And I looked at her teacher, a woman who just met me the day before, and admitted through my tears that I did not know what to do.

It’s a hard confession to make. What kind of parent doesn’t know what to do when their child is upset and crying? Me. The mom who just got back from Iraq doesn’t know how to deal with her child’s separation anxiety. The mom who just got back from Iraq was prepared to hear I don’t love you or I want Grammy when her kids got mad at her. The mom who just got back was not prepared to hear “I don’t think you love me” at a rest stop in New Jersey.

What kind of mom doesn’t know what her kid’s favorite food is or what to do when they’re acting out? The guilt I feel for leaving my kids is coloring my decisions on how to interact with them and I know there will be consequences down the road.

When most dad’s come home, mom has been there holding things down. There’s a transition period but life has only been missing a single piece, instead of being uprooted entirely. In my kids’ case, we not only left them with my mom, we took away their home and their pets, their daycare and all the reminders of what their daily life was with us. Our animals, too, had to move in with relatives for the duration of the year, so they even lost their pets.

Coming home this time around is not as simple as picking Daddy up on the First Cavalry Division’s parade field. Coming home this time involves figuring out what it means to be a parent again. A mom who has uprooted their children’s lives once more and left them with an aching insecurity that mommy and daddy are going to leave again.

I’m not saying that dad’s who deploy don’t have transitions to make when they come home. But when both Mommy and Daddy are gone, the impact is different. It’s harder on me emotionally in some ways because I’ve been the stability in our children’s lives for the last two deployments. I always know what to do with them.

But now, I’ve stood in the hallway, surrounded by seventy five year olds and cried, because I didn’t know what to do.

For thousands of moms who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, they will feel the pain of their infant children calling someone else mommy because they were babies when their mom’s left. They will feel the helplessness of not knowing how to handle a tantrum and the awkwardness of not knowing what their child likes to eat. And, if they choose to remain in the army, they will feel the fear of the next deployment, knowing that as soon as they figure out what normal is, their families will be uprooted once more.

I know what it feels like now to become a mom again. And I know the fear of deploying again. Of taking my children from their home and uprooting their lives once more. It’s the life I lead, the life I chose. The life of a mom, who is also a soldier.

My choice, however, does not make today’s pain any easier to bear.

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Jim, Julie and Amber, email me your address so I can send you a copy of Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On.

I’m sending all three of you a copy of this fantastic read direct from Amazon!

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You knew it was only a matter of time before I posted on the controversial pregnancy policy from MND-North’s commanding general. Of course I can’t keep my mouth shut.

First, a disclaimer: I am NOT questioning this general’s decision. He has smarter people than me advising him and coming up with their recommendations on his policies.

Second, I completely understand where he’s coming from. In his public statements, he says that in the coming draw down, he needs every available soldier to successfully command and control the battlespace he’s been assigned.

I partially disagree with this assessment. Anyone who has been in the army for a minute knows that there are folks who get the dog shit worked out of them and those who skate by and those who take more time and energy herding than they can ever possibly contribute to the team.

I do not agree that punishing females who get pregnant is a message that we want to send to our women in the armed forces. We make up less than 20 percent of the force. The last number I saw was something like 13 percent. In my brigade, we had less than 30 females on rear detachment who were pregnant. We had two in my company redeployed from Iraq because they got pregnant while they were deployed.

Full disclosure: in 2003, while in PCS status from Korea back to Ft Hood, my husband and I found out we were pregnant. We lost that pregnancy and a subsequent one. After the second miscarriage, once the docs cleared me, I was going to go back on birth control. We’d try again when Iraq 04 was over. Except that wasn’t in the plan. We managed to get pregnant with our firstborn two weeks after miscarrying the second time.

I was mortified. I was also treated like shit. The female officers I worked with were absolutely amazing in their support. The major who was the deputy OIC at the time walked in on me at 0600, bawling my eyes out and was horrified. When I told her I was pregnant, she said “that’s it?” She thought that for my extreme reaction, my husband had been killed or wounded in Iraq.

Long story short, the sergeant major of my section sat me down and told me that when I miscarried this one, I would be on the first thing smoking to Iraq. Not only did this man, this leader tell me that I was a disappointment to the team, he told me he was pursuing action against me for deliberately getting pregnant to get out of a deployment. It didn’t matter if it was harsh or untrue. I could not defend myself because I agreed with him. I was a disappointment. I was that girl. The one who got knocked up right before a deployment.

Fast forward to 2010. I spent half the 2009 deployment in Iraq in mortal fear that my birth control would fail and I would be sent home again, head held low in shame, pregnant again. Ask my husband. I was neurotic about it.

When one of my soldiers turned up pregnant, I defended her. Shit happens. She got pregnant while she was home on leave. She was still part of the team. She was still a soldier. She had decisions to make but she was still one of us. I slammed an NCO who tried to make her feel bad for getting pregnant. I defended her.

When another NCO in our company said that one of our females was making up post partum depression to get out of deploying again, once more I spoke up. I asked him if he’d ever miscarried. He said no and I told him I had. Twice. The first one was emotionally devastating. The second one, too. I told him to wait and give her the opportunity to get her head back in the game, then bring her out.

She deployed. She was welcomed back. And no one dared say a damn thing to her about her miscarriage or her reaction to it.

Here’s the thing. No matter how much we try to regulate pregnancy through policy, which is what this general is, at the end of the day doing, this policy unfairly targets females. Yes, there are absolutely women out there who get pregnant to avoid deploying. I won’t deny that. But there are also significantly more men who fake PTSD to get out of deploying. Who have family problems. Who go to the first sergeant and say ‘my wife is going to leave me if I deploy again’. Why are their excuses shrugged off (as a matter of policy) when females who get pregnant are targeted

There are a myriad of reasons why soldiers can’t deploy. Most of us will do so. Most have already done so. My unit’s response to my pregnancy in 2004? Put me on orders, regardless of the fact that my leaving did nothing to help their deployable numbers. It was the best thing they ever did for me but I still carry that shame around with me. I was that girl. And I am sure that with many of the officers and NCOs I worked with then, my reputation will never recover from that. Five years later, I still feel the scarlet letter P emblazoned on my chest.

I’m hard enough on myself over that. I do not need some sergeant major telling me I’m a piece of shit for not deploying. I do not believe that punishing these soldiers with a local letter of reprimand or with an article fifteen, both punishments that do not follow a soldier but still have the stigma attached to them, and yes, both can be documented on NCOER and OERs, which then DO become a matter of permanent record.

We as an army must find a way to allow our women to serve without fear of reprisals for something that, even if they are taking steps to prevent it, can still happen. No sex policies didn’t work. I remember sending condoms to a friend in Iraq because she couldn’t get them at the PX. Now that was a smart policy decision. No sex and no condoms because hey, you’re not supposed to be having sex. And we wonder why there was a rampant STD problem over there.

So instead of punishing women – even married women who are deployed with their spouses – let’s look at making our females, yes even our pregnant females, part of the team. Let’s figure out a way to put our arms around them and say, okay, you’re on rear d but I need you while I’m down range. Here’s how you can help the team.

What about the argument that says you should plan your family around the deployment. Really? We’ve been on deployments since 2001. The First Cav has deployed every other year since 2004. When are you supposed to have a family? And what about those dual military couples out there who are on opposite rotations and who get less than 6 months together before one of them ships out again? When are they supposed to have a family then?

I understand that the family and army is a difficult life to juggle. I do not believe that my being a female makes me any less reliable or more reliable than my male counter parts. I do not believe that my being a mother makes me less of an officer. My beliefs are quantifiable because none of my previous supervisors have ever remarked on it, either formally or informally. My ratings have been in the top ten percent of officers and NCOs in the army.

I will do my best to serve my commander’s needs. I will also do my best to make sure that my children’s needs are met.

Punishing me because my husband and I decide to have another baby is not the right answer. It sends the wrong message to our soldiers, male and female. It targets a problem with a solution that is an excessive amount of force. There is no right time to have a baby in the army.

And you know what? The army will replace me. My family can’t.

(FYI, Mom, I’m not pregnant.)

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Ah, yes. Why else would editors and agents tell authors to get a web page even before they begin querying? Why else would it be one of the first things that publicity departments tell authors with books coming out?

But the biggest reason social networking works is because of: me.

Not me, me. You, me. The millions of me’s out on the net, cruising facebook and twitter and myspace. Maybe you learned about a new author from a friend’s recommendation on facebook. Maybe you see an author’s comments on Twitter.

But when I was walking through the bookstore yesterday, I was busy scanning for author’s names I knew. Authors I hadn’t even heard of before I hopped on line and decided to reach out to the writing world. Authors who would have been another name on the shelf now stand out to me. I turn books of authors I know, of books I love so that the cover is facing forward.

There is also an aspect of loyalty. Authors who have sent care packages and school supplies to Iraq, I remember. I look for their names.

The name is what matters. The author behind it and the books the author is hoping you’ll buy. This book or that will come and go, but building a brand is what social networking is all about. Building a name so that when a million other me’s go to the bookstore, your name is what they’re looking for, either consciously or unconsciously. When they see it, there will be a flash of recognition, followed maybe by a flash of a purchase.

But social networking works. It creates online word of mouth but it creates something more: name recognition. Maybe you’ve exchanged tweets with an author. Maybe you simply commented on someone’s facebook wall because they were having the same kind of day you were.

But social networking works.

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In the romance genre, we have a significant challenge with loving a whore. The whore can be the slutty best friend, the whore can be reformed. But the whore cannot be herself and she most certainly cannot remain a whore and become a romance heroine.

In part, this is because of our society’s struggle with female sexuality. Too many ‘real’ authors have dismissed romance as simply ‘porn for women’. In some cases, they’re right. The books they refer to have little to no plot and are simply a loose series of events surrounding various positions and bodily orifices.

But when you get a romance novel that is truly incredible, the argument that it’s porn for women falls completely flat. The fact is that even though romance novels often have sex scenes in them, the door can be either open or closed, but the best sex scenes involve the character’s emotions, solidifying the thought that the way to a woman’s heart is through her brain.

We still have the problem of sexuality to deal with. A romance heroine cannot be a slut. Too often a woman’s sordid past is explained away as a misunderstanding or a vicious rumor. Infidelity is also usually a misunderstanding that can be resolved with ‘the talk’ that clears everything up.

Books that stick with me, however, challenge these stereotypes. In Sherry Thomas’s Private Arrangements, the hero and the heroine had been unfaithful but managed to reconcile despite it. There was no easy way to explain away what happened. They had to work for it. And in Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On, Jane really had been a teenage tramp.

Jane is the inspiration for this post. She was not transformed from her trashy ways by a man. Actually she was, but that man was her step father, not her hero. Jane did not need to get forgiveness for her sins as a teenager from anyone else. She had to be able to look in the mirror and accept that who she was today came from what she’d grown up as. She’d walked a hard road and had survived because of who she was, not by explaining her past away. And the man who loved her did so even knowing about her past.

Looking at either of these books, I would have been disappointed had there been an easy explanation for the sins of the past. I liked the fact that these characters were genuinely flawed. I liked the fact that they had to make change themselves and accept that someone else could love them for who they were because of who they were, not because of who they were with their other half.

I think a lot romance readers read for escape. We want the fantasy of having our own sins erased or the daily trouble in our lives overshadowed with the certainty of a happy ending. I think Jane’s happy ending was incredibly satisfying for me because she finally got over her sins on her own, with Mr Right waiting there for her to simply accept herself.

And that is what we should all strive for. Being able to look in the mirror and love ourselves for who we are and what we’ve done. Easy explanations for what we have done cheapen the value of us as individuals.

Writer’s who can capture the value of their hero’s and heroine’s flaws and enable the reader to relate to them create characters that are truly memorable but also teach us something.

Something powerful.

With Victoria Dahl’s permission, I’m giving away a copy of Lean Me On to a random commenter today. Have you read it? What did you think?

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I’m not one on starting the new year off and saying I’m going to do loose fifteen pounds by February 15. It’s never happened before and I’m not sure why I would think starting now is anything different than on December 31^st.

But I am a big fan of goals and I’m an even bigger fan of attainable goals. So this year, I’m setting goals and I’m telling y’all about them so at the end of 2010, I can come back and let you know how I did.

Last year, I didn’t really have any goals, other than come home from Iraq and land an agent. I managed to do both, except that the agent part didn’t really stick. So I’m on the agent hunt again, and that’s okay. And making it home safe and sound from Iraq is an extra bonus that’s a whole ‘nother adventure in and of itself.

Last year, I started a group blog for military romance called Romance Roll Call. I’m hoping to provide a resource for those who love military romance, both reading and writing it, as well as for those of us who are simply military writers. So that was really great and the blog continues to build.

I think I learned to write last year by working with an incredible critique partner. By working with her, I learned to revise my own stuff better, though not, entirely, without hiccups. I also learned to let go, more than once, and how to deal with an utter and complete inability to write (accept it and take time to refill the well).

Last year, I realized that I was not going to finish reading a book that wasn’t compelling to me. There are too many amazing books out there to waste time on one that doesn’t really grab hold and pull me into its world.

This year, however, is different. This year, I want to get an agent who really wants me and my body of work as a client and is willing to say here’s what we need to do, let’s go. I hope the book I’m working on now will be the book that gets me out there.

This year, I will be better at being a mom. Granted, last year, I had no time being a mom, other than an absentee one, but this year, I’m going to focus on what’s really important: my kids. I don’t get that time back and they need me more than anyone else does.

The only other thing I’m going to do is keep reading. I’m absolutely positive that I won’t have the same amount of time to read in the States as I had in Iraq, but I’m not going to give up the passion I was able to rediscover this past year. There are books I’m simply dying to read that are coming out soon and I’m going to read them, not just stick them on my book shelf!

So that’s it. Those are my goals. You might notice I did not put sell a novel on there. I can’t control that. I can’t control if I land an agent, but I certainly hope I do. So we’ll see how it goes.

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In David Finkle’s The Good Soldiers, Finkle describes a ‘bad news bucket”, an emotional coping cache that, once filled, puts a soldier near the breaking point. According to Finkle, who heard of the idea from Gen Petraus (I believe) soldiers need good news in order to drain the bad news they carry around inside them.

When I read Finkle’s description, I thought, this was it exactly.  There were days in Iraq where I simply couldn’t handle anything else, that I was barely holding on and needed to get away and pull it back together so that I could continue.

I did not expect this once I returned home but apparently, I have my own version of the bad news bucket: the mommy box. I discovered very early on in my deployment that I needed to stay busy in order to keep my mind on the tasks at hand and not sit and mope about my kids. They were happy, they were healthy and they were in my mom’s more than capable hands. I didn’t need to worry.

What I was doing, apparently, was shoving everything inside the mommy box and closing the lid. I shut those emotions down and ignored them.

Except that sometimes, the box got too full. Like on my oldest’s first day of school. My husband and I both agree that they hardest day on this deployment was missing that event. Birthdays we could recreate. Anniversaries, we would ignore. But the first day of school is something we can’t get back and we don’t get a do over.

But having put everything aside for the duration, I fully expected to come home and simply go back to normal. I did not expect to be crying the first weekend back with the kids every day for four days. It seemed like I couldn’t stop. And I also discovered that drinking makes the mommy box even harder to handle.  Apparently, alcohol unleashes the flood of emotions that I’ve still got boxed up inside me.

I can sit back and pretend that everything is fine now that we’re all home, having hauled the entire family back from the diaspora but that would be lying to myself. I’m not fine but I am one hell of a lot better now that I’ve got my family back together. There are still a slew of emotions inside me that I still have to handle and I’m sure they’re going to leak out, a little at a time (because I’m not drinking anymore, but that’s another post).

The mommy box was set in a corner for an entire year. Now, I guess, it’s time to clean it out.

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