Saturday - purchase ginormous box of Cascade dishwashing soap cause it's on sale.
Sunday, 9:30 AM - wrench lower back/ass area with an ominous and audible popping sound whilst picking up ginormous box to load dishwasher with soap. Spend rest of day moaning about my lot in life, sitting my butt on a heating pad and pretending to write.
Monday, 6:30 AM- limp to car, drive to school, take elevator to 2nd floor with kids on crutches. Decline to explain the source of my limp. Cause honestly - I wrenched every ligament in my ass on a box of Cascade? Please. Hope pain killers keep working.
Monday, 9:30 AM - decide during conference period that it will make me feel better to eat part of a Hershey dark chocolate bar. Take half a bite and have chocolate piece wrench the new crown (the one that's fallen out once already since the root canal back in October) pull up and out into my chocolately mouth. Spit crown and chocolate into kleenex and limp to bathroom muttering school inappropriate words. Call dentist. Get appt. for that afternoon. Cancel training session I was supposed to attend.
Monday, 10:30 AM - teach "Ex Basketball Player" by John Updike with empty space in mouth where tooth is supposed to be while tooth resides in a piece of kleenex in my purse.
Monday, 11:30 AM - log on to check my email and discover that Updike has died.
Monday, sometime after the dentist replaces my tooth with hopefully strong cement and some chatter about how excited he is about my soon to be released Dreaming Anastasia while I figure that for us to come out even he'd have to buy like 10,000 copies - go home and reach into make up bag to get lipgloss and slice thumb on uncovered disposable razor. Bleed profusely all over Benefits "Talk to My Agent" gloss tube.
Monday evening - sit without moving on heating pad and watch tv rather than risk disturbing the universe anymore than I already have.
Til next time...
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
It's the middle of January and I-
Well, I'm all over the place at this moment. Anxiously awaiting the inauguration on Tuesday. I haven't been excited about an inauguration in a very long time. Honestly, if ever. Don't think I'm alone in that. Anxious about some writing stuff, too, but staying closed lipped about that. I try to be one of those people who just cavalierly tells all about current project status but I just can't be that person so I've stopped trying. However, if you have fingers or toes or anything else crossable and I've ever been nice to you or asked about your dog or if you've checked out my picture and said, wow, that is one stellar human; I think I'm going to send her some good mojo in between hoping for world peace and a way out of the financial crisis, then this would be the time.
I grew up in Chicago, so I think a lack of fondness for the winter months is in my DNA. I associate them with cold so intense that your eyeballs freeze up, there's ice on your scarf where's it's covered your mouth and you're pretty sure that by the time the bus comes you'll be frozen stiff on the corner, just a little joysicle some kind soul will have to drag up the steps if they're so inclined which mostly likely they're not. I received my one and only F in college - in ballet!!! which I have no idea why I was taking except certainly I must have partied hearty the night before we signed up for classes the previous fall - because it was almost a full mile walk to Patton Gymnasium and there was too much snow and it was too cold for me to go that far three times a week to put on a leotard and tights and then suffer humiliation because a ballerina I most certainly am not. Yes, there was once a girl stupid enough to sign up for ballet as an extra class even though she still remembered the ignominy of tap class back when she was eight and stupid enough to cut ballet most of a semester and whose transcript from a very fine university now bears the evidence of said stupidity. The February breakup with the rebound boyfriend on the fencing scholarship was only the icing on the stupidity cake that year. But a couple of months later that spring I reconciled with a different guy who is currently downstairs taking a shower so we can drive to Home Depot and maybe stop for waffles. So there ya go. Winter sucks, but spring can give you some nice surprises. One of which has stuck around for a long time, crazy man that he is.
Winter in Houston is a lot less taxing. Summer of course, is the payback. And we lie about summer to our Midwestern friends and relatives just the same way they lie to us about below zero temps. "Not so bad," we say. "We've had worse." And we all roll our eyes.
Anyway, if it's cold where you are, pick up a copy of Judy Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied, that just won the National Book Award. It is phenomenal. I'm over the moon for this book. YA noir fiction -so beautifully written that you'll linger over sentences, just not wanting to move forward. Evie Spooner is one heck of a narrator; the period details of the late 1940's are so exquisite you feel like you're there and the plot - murder, racism, classism, adultery, love, loss, truth, lies - so gripping it won't let you go anytime soon. This is a genius gem of a novel. Evie wants the truth of what's been happening on her Queen's NY family's sudden trip to Palm Beach, Fla. Or maybe she doesn't. She thinks the fellow she's fallen for loves her back. Or maybe he doesn't. Or shouldn't. Or maybe something else is going on that will crack Evie's world open in ways she never expected. I read the book in just a day or so; and it hasn't let go of me yet.
Til next time...
I grew up in Chicago, so I think a lack of fondness for the winter months is in my DNA. I associate them with cold so intense that your eyeballs freeze up, there's ice on your scarf where's it's covered your mouth and you're pretty sure that by the time the bus comes you'll be frozen stiff on the corner, just a little joysicle some kind soul will have to drag up the steps if they're so inclined which mostly likely they're not. I received my one and only F in college - in ballet!!! which I have no idea why I was taking except certainly I must have partied hearty the night before we signed up for classes the previous fall - because it was almost a full mile walk to Patton Gymnasium and there was too much snow and it was too cold for me to go that far three times a week to put on a leotard and tights and then suffer humiliation because a ballerina I most certainly am not. Yes, there was once a girl stupid enough to sign up for ballet as an extra class even though she still remembered the ignominy of tap class back when she was eight and stupid enough to cut ballet most of a semester and whose transcript from a very fine university now bears the evidence of said stupidity. The February breakup with the rebound boyfriend on the fencing scholarship was only the icing on the stupidity cake that year. But a couple of months later that spring I reconciled with a different guy who is currently downstairs taking a shower so we can drive to Home Depot and maybe stop for waffles. So there ya go. Winter sucks, but spring can give you some nice surprises. One of which has stuck around for a long time, crazy man that he is.
Winter in Houston is a lot less taxing. Summer of course, is the payback. And we lie about summer to our Midwestern friends and relatives just the same way they lie to us about below zero temps. "Not so bad," we say. "We've had worse." And we all roll our eyes.
Anyway, if it's cold where you are, pick up a copy of Judy Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied, that just won the National Book Award. It is phenomenal. I'm over the moon for this book. YA noir fiction -so beautifully written that you'll linger over sentences, just not wanting to move forward. Evie Spooner is one heck of a narrator; the period details of the late 1940's are so exquisite you feel like you're there and the plot - murder, racism, classism, adultery, love, loss, truth, lies - so gripping it won't let you go anytime soon. This is a genius gem of a novel. Evie wants the truth of what's been happening on her Queen's NY family's sudden trip to Palm Beach, Fla. Or maybe she doesn't. She thinks the fellow she's fallen for loves her back. Or maybe he doesn't. Or shouldn't. Or maybe something else is going on that will crack Evie's world open in ways she never expected. I read the book in just a day or so; and it hasn't let go of me yet.
Til next time...
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Getting to Know Your Characters
I'm going to post more about this in my inaugural post on our Class of 2k9 Live Journal blog on Tuesday, but I wanted to start mulling things over here first.
So here's the question: How do you get to know your characters? I'm sensing it's different for each writer. And maybe even each book. Anne Michaelson in Dreaming Anastasia (Sourcebooks, Fall '09) began as a voice of this snarky sixteen year old. I'd been poking around for something I really could sustain into a novel. And then there she was, sort of full grown like Athena out of Zeus's head or something.
Only not exactly. The original Anne was simply a sixteen year old girl who seemed to be getting in trouble a lot (that sort of changed) and who knew about the Romanov history and was bored out of her mind in history class. The Anne you'll meet come September when DA hits the shelves, is real, fleshed out person. It's the in between that fascinates me. The trying to track back to how did I really get to know this girl.
Same thing for Andy Meyers in the recently finished Cut Back. And KC Sweet from Sweet Dreams, that I'm itching to get back to when I finish the last of my Dreaming edits. They began as ideas; ended up as people who seem as real to me as friends and family.
So the question is, how did I move from hey I've got this idea about this girl named Anne and this guy named Ethan or this other guy named Andy to people who readers can feel they know? And I guess it's sort of like that old joke about how do you get to Carnegie Hall. (Practice!) It's a sometimes meticulous, sometimes muse inspired, oftentimes messy pages of scribbled notes journey of discovery that ends up with me knowing more than will ever appear on the page but will most certainly inform everything my main characters do and say and think. Meaning that eventually, the question "What would Anne say here? What does she want? Really?" is answerable in a way that is organic to who she is.
More over at the 2k9 blog on Tuesday. See link above and see you there! And feel free to chime in here and there about how you achieve characters that you really really know.
Til next time...
So here's the question: How do you get to know your characters? I'm sensing it's different for each writer. And maybe even each book. Anne Michaelson in Dreaming Anastasia (Sourcebooks, Fall '09) began as a voice of this snarky sixteen year old. I'd been poking around for something I really could sustain into a novel. And then there she was, sort of full grown like Athena out of Zeus's head or something.
Only not exactly. The original Anne was simply a sixteen year old girl who seemed to be getting in trouble a lot (that sort of changed) and who knew about the Romanov history and was bored out of her mind in history class. The Anne you'll meet come September when DA hits the shelves, is real, fleshed out person. It's the in between that fascinates me. The trying to track back to how did I really get to know this girl.
Same thing for Andy Meyers in the recently finished Cut Back. And KC Sweet from Sweet Dreams, that I'm itching to get back to when I finish the last of my Dreaming edits. They began as ideas; ended up as people who seem as real to me as friends and family.
So the question is, how did I move from hey I've got this idea about this girl named Anne and this guy named Ethan or this other guy named Andy to people who readers can feel they know? And I guess it's sort of like that old joke about how do you get to Carnegie Hall. (Practice!) It's a sometimes meticulous, sometimes muse inspired, oftentimes messy pages of scribbled notes journey of discovery that ends up with me knowing more than will ever appear on the page but will most certainly inform everything my main characters do and say and think. Meaning that eventually, the question "What would Anne say here? What does she want? Really?" is answerable in a way that is organic to who she is.
More over at the 2k9 blog on Tuesday. See link above and see you there! And feel free to chime in here and there about how you achieve characters that you really really know.
Til next time...
Sunday, January 4, 2009
2009 here we are!
Welcome to 2009! My class of 2k9 - http://www.classof2k9.com/ - certainly wants you to come visit our website and read our books as they come out this year! Some of us are also members of the Debs - another 2009 group bonded together and enjoying this great ride. And wonderful sites like http://mrsvsreviews.blogspot.com/ and http://www.thestorysiren.com/2009/01/09-debut-authors-challenge.html have set up challenges to do the same! Thanks to them and to Little Willow at Slayground for mentioning all of us and supporting us in this most exciting of creative endeavors!!
Had my own moment of exciting squeee over the holiday when it turned out that agent Jen Rofe and I were going to be Vegas at the same time and so we had our very first breakfast meeting! I would tell you about it but you know what they say about Vegas...
Til next time...
Sunday, December 28, 2008
What I used to read and how I got to here
Just finished reading Caitlin Flanagan's article "What Girls Want" from December's Atlantic Monthly. I'm presuming it's getting a lot of chatter because she tells us, "I hate YA novels; they bore me." And hey, I had my hackles up, too when I read that isolated from the rest of the article. But in the larger context of what she's saying, well, I don't agree with her, but I take her to mean that in her current "reading life" as she calls it, they don't meet her emotional needs, life, whatever. Okay. Like I say, they seem to meet mine. Let's agree to disagree and move on. Because it's the rest of the article that held my personal interest. Essentially six more pages discussing why Twilight is in her word, "fantastic." Lots of talk about Bella's obsession with her potential defiling by Edward and Edward's refusal to defile her and Meyer's sort of retro subversive description of Bella performing housewifely tasks like cooking Charlie dinner. And how one spring afternoon, Flanagan cut geometry to go off with her boyfriend and get some red wine and whatever followed that.
Okay, there's a reason I'm not a college academic and I prefer to teach high school, even if I do have a very expensive and rareified Northwestern English degree and all my profs had degrees from Harvard and Yale and passed all their really cool lit knowledge on to me. So I'll admit the above summary is lazy and too brief. But hey (pointed comment coming) I write YA. I cut out the fluff and get to the meat of the story. Action over meditation. Almost always. Which I think is good. And gets the story going and cuts out twelve pages of meditative longing over some Proustian church spire or whatever. (see, I told you - highbrow education under there somewhere)
But here's the thing. Flanagan talks of the books she devoured as a girl. (and also has some really funny sentences such as the one in which she says of the young women of Gossip Girl, "these chippies could make a crack whore look like Clara Barton." - which really did get me chuckling even I happen to disagree and think that Blair has a heart of gold somewhere under all that La Perla (or whatever it is; I can't afford it so I don't think about it) underwear. And about why girls love Edward.
And it all got me thinking about the books and heroines I loved as a girl and a teen. Which got me thinking about what I write and how my characters live. About what they want and don't.
So here's the thing - I never wanted to be Jane Eyre. I was pissed at Mr. Rochester for not telling her that small little detail about the crazy wife in the attic. I was okay that he was blinded at the end of the book. I always preferred Jo March to fussy Amy or Meg. (I actually loved Beth best, but then she died which seemed rather weak willed of her even though it made me cry) Jo had to settle for the German professor guy because certainly Laurie was never strong enough for her. Which pissed me off in ways I couldn't express when I was eight or nine. I loved Meg in Wrinkle in Time. She was strong and feisty and my kind of girl. I loved the girl in Judy Blume's Forever (sorry I can't remember her name at the moment) because she chose to have sex and then move on from a relationship that was very nice but needed to be over and - gasp - didn't die from it or catch a disease or suffer needlessly and had in fact made sure to go to Planned Parenthood first. Okay, it was all a little clinical at times, but she was a take charge girl. I had no patience for the sufferings of Madame Bovary and whatshername in the Kate Chopin's Awakening or even poor Anna Karenina. I thought Heathcliff was a whiner.
In short - I never ever wanted the guy to save me. Which, I'm certain accounts for me begin on "team Jacob" in Twi-world and not team Edward. And why Anne in my very own Dreaming Anastasia (Sourcebooks, Fall 09!!) is a feisty little sixteen year old who doesn't take much guff. And Ethan in that very same book - not to give away much at this point - might need some saving instead. And why Andy Meyers in the current WIP Cut Back is generally flummoxed by the females in his world.
So I guess my answer to What Girls Want is different than some. This girl wants an equal partnership whenever she can get it. If saving is needed, let the girl save the boy sometimes, too. Or maybe, they can just both save each other.
Til next time...
Okay, there's a reason I'm not a college academic and I prefer to teach high school, even if I do have a very expensive and rareified Northwestern English degree and all my profs had degrees from Harvard and Yale and passed all their really cool lit knowledge on to me. So I'll admit the above summary is lazy and too brief. But hey (pointed comment coming) I write YA. I cut out the fluff and get to the meat of the story. Action over meditation. Almost always. Which I think is good. And gets the story going and cuts out twelve pages of meditative longing over some Proustian church spire or whatever. (see, I told you - highbrow education under there somewhere)
But here's the thing. Flanagan talks of the books she devoured as a girl. (and also has some really funny sentences such as the one in which she says of the young women of Gossip Girl, "these chippies could make a crack whore look like Clara Barton." - which really did get me chuckling even I happen to disagree and think that Blair has a heart of gold somewhere under all that La Perla (or whatever it is; I can't afford it so I don't think about it) underwear. And about why girls love Edward.
And it all got me thinking about the books and heroines I loved as a girl and a teen. Which got me thinking about what I write and how my characters live. About what they want and don't.
So here's the thing - I never wanted to be Jane Eyre. I was pissed at Mr. Rochester for not telling her that small little detail about the crazy wife in the attic. I was okay that he was blinded at the end of the book. I always preferred Jo March to fussy Amy or Meg. (I actually loved Beth best, but then she died which seemed rather weak willed of her even though it made me cry) Jo had to settle for the German professor guy because certainly Laurie was never strong enough for her. Which pissed me off in ways I couldn't express when I was eight or nine. I loved Meg in Wrinkle in Time. She was strong and feisty and my kind of girl. I loved the girl in Judy Blume's Forever (sorry I can't remember her name at the moment) because she chose to have sex and then move on from a relationship that was very nice but needed to be over and - gasp - didn't die from it or catch a disease or suffer needlessly and had in fact made sure to go to Planned Parenthood first. Okay, it was all a little clinical at times, but she was a take charge girl. I had no patience for the sufferings of Madame Bovary and whatshername in the Kate Chopin's Awakening or even poor Anna Karenina. I thought Heathcliff was a whiner.
In short - I never ever wanted the guy to save me. Which, I'm certain accounts for me begin on "team Jacob" in Twi-world and not team Edward. And why Anne in my very own Dreaming Anastasia (Sourcebooks, Fall 09!!) is a feisty little sixteen year old who doesn't take much guff. And Ethan in that very same book - not to give away much at this point - might need some saving instead. And why Andy Meyers in the current WIP Cut Back is generally flummoxed by the females in his world.
So I guess my answer to What Girls Want is different than some. This girl wants an equal partnership whenever she can get it. If saving is needed, let the girl save the boy sometimes, too. Or maybe, they can just both save each other.
Til next time...
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
2k9 has gone live!
Head on over to www.classof2k9.com
My fellow debut authors and I are waiting for you!
Our first book out of the chute is Rosanne Perry's Heart of a Shepherd, coming in January. It's already getting some great press and word of mouth and you can read all about it and all the rest when you stop on by. Book talk guides, teacher's guides, related recipes. We're serving up fresh fiction for all to enjoy. Even have an Author to Go program you might really like.
I'm excited and thrilled and humbled at all the talent I've been privileged to associate with. So come on by and let us show you what we're doing.
Til next time...
My fellow debut authors and I are waiting for you!
Our first book out of the chute is Rosanne Perry's Heart of a Shepherd, coming in January. It's already getting some great press and word of mouth and you can read all about it and all the rest when you stop on by. Book talk guides, teacher's guides, related recipes. We're serving up fresh fiction for all to enjoy. Even have an Author to Go program you might really like.
I'm excited and thrilled and humbled at all the talent I've been privileged to associate with. So come on by and let us show you what we're doing.
Til next time...
Sunday, December 7, 2008
A little gratitude
Agent Jen's been keeping a gratitude journal. I'm not quite that ambitious but as I'm nonetheless thankful lately, I figured it was time. Three years ago, I began typing up my New Year's resolutions. I tuck them into an old planner I keep in my nightstand (okay, it's BTVS planner husband gave me at some point in some moment of enabling my Buffy obsession and it's got great pictures so I don't throw it away, but I digress) Call me crazy, but the act of writing the stuff down really made a difference for me. Not everything gets done, but if I keep them doable and not ridiculous, it seems to work out. As I'm the girl who keeps a life list of things I want to accomplish and places I want to travel to in my pocket calendar in my purse, it all seems to make a certain kind of sense.
But back to the gratitude. We're all - and for many good reasons - rather gloom and doom these days, but I woke up thinking perhaps we just need to change how we're looking at it. 401 K in the toilet? Then figure out some other way to save. That kind of thing. Glass half full or at least not cracked and crushed under someone's bootheel.
So, on this 7th of December, (not the most auspicious date in history for a gratitude list but wouldn't ya know this would be the day I'd post this?), in no particular order,I am officially grateful for:
But back to the gratitude. We're all - and for many good reasons - rather gloom and doom these days, but I woke up thinking perhaps we just need to change how we're looking at it. 401 K in the toilet? Then figure out some other way to save. That kind of thing. Glass half full or at least not cracked and crushed under someone's bootheel.
So, on this 7th of December, (not the most auspicious date in history for a gratitude list but wouldn't ya know this would be the day I'd post this?), in no particular order,I am officially grateful for:
- agent Jen and former agent Michelle who both believe in me
- Andrea Brown who re-matched me with Jen even as I was sitting off the power grid post Ike.
- a messy, comfy house
- really nice neighbors
- my 2k9 group to share the publishing roller coaster
- my critique buddies
- a crazy posse of friends
- health, including the healing of the abcessed tooth and some kind of tendon sprain in my ankle. Both are gone and I am delighted
- husband who loves me
- son who is funny, brave, kind, and amazingly mostly off our payroll!
- the current cool weather
- having survived Hurricane Ike
- Sourcebooks publishing who took a chance on me and even paid me cash American
- a full time day job that reminds me every day why I write for teenagers
- a crazy extended family and friends who've become like family
- an amazing thing called Kinko's Fed Ex print on line
- democracy
- our new president elect
- my Chi flat iron
Til next time...
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