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2012 Dibby Hill Awards

2012-01-10T10:47:00.003-05:00

Herewith the eagerly anticipated 2011 Dibby Hill Book Awards, based on what I read in 2011, not what was published in 2011:

Book of the Year, Skippie Dies (a grand tale, brilliantly told, Holden Caulfield meets Oscar Wao in an Irish prep school)

Best Young-Adult Novel: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Best Crime Novel: A Single Shot

Best Non-Fiction: A Concise History of Spain

2011, 56 total:

39. Graceling, Kristin Cashore
38. Racing the Devil, Jaden Terrell
37. Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
36. The Grey Fairy Book, Andrew Lang
35. A Single Shot, Matthew F. Jones
34. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Eagan
33. A Concise History of Spain, William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips
323. The Innocent, Taylor Stevens
31. The Informationist, Taylor Stevens
30. The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall
28-29. Palladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
26-27. The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkienn
25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King, Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
11-17. Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope
10. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

The Winter Solstice

2011-12-21T17:11:00.004-05:00

We are sinking to the low energy point of the year, the time when we should be hibernating in our dens, the time when the fires die out and we clean the hearths and light a new flame of hope that once again spring and light will return.

It's a time to go inward, go deep, rest, guard the spark of life within.

2011 so far:

39. Graceling, Kristin Cashore
38. Racing the Devil, Jaden Terrell
37. Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
36. The Grey Fairy Book, Andrew Lang
35. A Single Shot, Matthew F. Jones
34. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Eagan
33. A Concise History of Spain, William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips
323. The Innocent, Taylor Stevens
31. The Informationist, Taylor Stevens
30. The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall
28-29. Palladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
26-27. The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkienn
25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
11-16. Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Anthony Trollope
10. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

G-4 Summit

2011-11-13T11:35:00.007-05:00

We had our G-4 Summit in Chicago in October. Fabulous in every way. From the storms we landed in on day one, to Lori's Shoes, to our favorite restaurant, Shine, to hearing the Bears fans erupt in cheers on Lincoln Avenue, to seeing the unbelievable Connie Crothers tear up the keyboard Sunday night at the Hungry Brain. Eva's EJS party at Dean Hines house, Brian, Ron and Steve's gig at the VFW hall in Willmette, where I danced by myself as if no one was watching, which they weren't, the Art Institute, which is so incredible, and the Performance Arts building, with its funky restaurant, Wagnerian star, darling bambino, and lovely used book store. The Villa D'Citta with its luxury and strange flakiness, a perfect place for G-4. Especially being able to host our friends for a little cocktail party, and snack late in the night. And the long nights of real conversation, the great laughing fits, hearing the core familiarity of my best friends' voices as I lay with my eyes closed, feeling their unconditional love.

I love Chicago, I love them. Miss it, miss them.

The 2011 list so far:

37. Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
36. The Grey Fairy Book, Andrew Lang
35. A Single Shot, Matthew F. Jones
34. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Eagan
33. A Concise History of Spain, William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips
323. The Innocent, Taylor Stevens
31. The Informationist, Taylor Stevens
30. The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall
28-29. Palladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
26-27. The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkienn
25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
11-12. Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope
10. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Tyranny in Tinseltown

2011-10-29T10:46:00.009-05:00

Occupy Wall Street protesters have for two nights running been hauled off to jail in the middle of the night on laughable charges after the governor and his administration whipped up a little unconstitutional ordinance/curfew and then selectively enforced it.

"Curfew" lasts from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Last night, well-dressed theater goers were not arrested when they crossed the plaza at 11 p.m. When they had cleared the area, police moved in and arrested the protesters for the second time, including a young reporter from the Nashville Scene, who clearly identified himself as a journalist. What a badge of honor he's collected!

An ACLU lawyer was on the plaza to bear witness so we hope a lawsuit will be swiftly forthcoming, and a request for an injunction.

Some points from the Nashville Scene's Pith in the Wind blog:

"I have reviewed the regulations of the state of Tennessee, and I can find no authority anywhere for anyone to authorize a curfew anywhere on Legislative Plaza," Judge Nelson told a grimacing trooper, before ordering the immediate release of everyone arrested.

Just after midnight some 20 Occupy Nashville protesters linked arms, awaiting arrest in violation of the Capitol's newly enacted curfew. A 10-minute warning was issued at approximately midnight, and some 60 to 75 Tennessee state troopers stood ready to enforce it. [Math: Three or four to one.]

"If you cant protest at the state capitol where can you protest? ... I say let them stay as long as they can stand up." Hard-right state Rep. Stacey Campfield

"Governor Haslam's administration was well within their right to impose a curfew on Legislative Plaza after mounting complaints by ‘Occupy Nashville’ protesters and local residents of personal theft, sexual obscenities, and defecation on the grounds by individuals staying for extended periods of time within Legislative Plaza. This was a matter of personal and public safety," Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chris Devaney. [Say what? They never set a curfew for the homeless who have camped on the plaza for years, swimming naked in the fountains, and pissing on the columns. And if anyone in Tennessee uses more sexual obscenities than state legislators, I'd like to meet them.)

Defending the action, [Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam] said state officials "don't really have the ability" to distinguish between law-abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and street people who might have been causing trouble at the Plaza. [No problem "distinguishing the TPAC theater crowd last night.]

"You have no lawful basis to arrest or charge those people," Metro Night Court Judge Tom Nelson

Update on My Psychotic Break

2011-10-16T11:28:00.006-05:00

Update on My Psychotic Break. The airy voices have returned and my writing seems to have broken through some kind of barrier and reached a new level, one where I stop farting around. Clarity, maybe?

Finished the excellent history of Spain by my brother and sister-in-law listed below. The writing sings; you can hear their wry, incisive voices. Fascinating, authoritative, nuanced, and well, brilliantly concise!

The 2011 list so far:

34. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Eagan
33. A Concise History of Spain, William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips
323. The Innocent, Taylor Stevens
31. The Informationist, Taylor Stevens
30. The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall
28-29. Palladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
26-27. The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkienn
25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
10. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Review of The Informationist

2011-10-04T21:26:00.004-05:00

Get to host author Taylor Stevens at the Southern Festival of Books next week. Really looking forward to meeting her. Link to my review of The Informationist is below.

The 2011 list so far:

32. The Informationist, Taylor Stevens-http://www.chapter16.org/content/deadly-information
31. The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall
29-30. Palladin of Souls, The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
26-28. The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, Sauron Defeated, Christopher Tolkienn
25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
10. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Confessions of an American Opium Eater: Or My Psychotic Break

2011-09-09T20:41:00.008-05:00

Tony Hough
In late July, after months, years, of abusing a congenitally weak and overtaxed back, I had an acute attack, crippling, agonizing episode of sciatica. This caused me intense shame initially, denial even. I have had a bad back since I was a baby. Among my earliest memories are those of lying in my parents' bed, a four-poster black wooden bed, and my mother rubbing my legs, singing to me and giving me grapefruit juice to ease the pain in my calves. Weirdly, given the tale I'm about to try to relate, at that same time, maybe even on those occasions, I had a recurrent hallucination. In my parents' bedroom was a small oil painting (I have it now in my dining room) of a field of bluebonnets (this was from my earliest childhood in San Antonio, where I was born). It's a simple painting of a field, rising up to a hill, with a wooden fence and trees on the crest of the hill. In my childhood waking dreams, I saw clearly and distinctly a group of horsemen ride to the top of that hill, rein in their mounts, look around and ride back down. This vision happened repeatedly, throughout the time I lived in San Antonio. We moved to Memphis when I was six years old and I have no memory of seeing the horsemen in the painting after we moved.

So this July, I made special efforts to destroy my back, standing up for two hours at a time once a week taking a stained glass class; trimming hedges in 100-degree heat; culminating in canoeing on the Caney Fork with the strong and energetic Jefe in the bow, ruddering relentlessly as he forged down the river. At the time, I thought, "this will kill me or cure me." When we finally stopped, I sat in the icy river for half an hour and was quite complacent. "I'm icing!" I congratulated myself.

By Wednesday, I was yelping periodically. It subsided. But by the next Tuesday, my left leg felt as if a red-hot rod was embedded in it. On that day, I had an appointment to have my four front teeth capped and had to take my car to the dealer for service. I had to hold my left leg up to even sign the credit card at the car dealer. I was so happy to be lying down at the dentist I was grateful to have my teeth sawed on for hours. At least I was lying down

The next day, I found that I not only could not walk, I couldn't even sit. I could only lie down in certain exquisitely calculated positions.

I called in sick and went to the doctor, who was filling in for my regular doctor, who was on vacation. This doctor threw the kitchen sink at me, scripts for acetominophen hydrocodone, 800 mm Ibuprophen, lidocaine patches, plus making me an appointment for an MRI on Monday and for PT on Tuesday.

This was the beginning of my psychotic break.

I started sucking down the hydrocodone and actually worked at home on Thursday and Friday, finishing a report that was due. The edits came back a few days ago and I had to laugh at all the vagueness and lassitude with fact and interpretation the editor noted.

By Saturday I'd say I was pretty much out of my mind. The hallucinations were broad and deep. Auditory: I would lie awake for hours every night hearing symphonies in the humming of the fan Jeff keeps on all night every night for white noise. In fact, one night I listened to hours of Bob Marley in the fan. Olfactory: I developed an aversion to a particular flavored coffee we had at the time, raspberry. Made me horribly sick, and even when I threw it out, I smelled it for weeks. Visual: This was the scariest part and probably the hardest to explain. When I closed my eyes, in a plane of sight I've been able to find since I was a little child, where I have always seen things, from blobs of grey and white flowing into and around each other shot with flecks of white or red light, to images of jungles and tigers slinking through high grass, in that plane, which is close, very close, I saw amazingly complex architectural structures, like the facades of cathedrals, with gargoyles and demons, their eyes glowing with red and white fire.

I was awake, and yet I couldn't escape from this basement junkyard of Jungian, id-ian, De Quinseyian, imagery. If I watched, with my eyes closed, the bright spots morphed into tiny, detailed constructs, like music boxes, and then into jack-in-the-boxes with terrible clowns oozing out and then click, click, change, change. Demons. Clowns, Dogs, Alligators, Weasels, Dragons. Terrible. Terrifying.

And yet I was too fucked up to just sit up and open my eyes. Instead I tried to claw my way up, out of the junkyard, which was like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, filled with the detritus of centuries of magicians. Up, up.

Finally after I stopped taking the hydrocodone on Saturday, by Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week (I'm not making this up) I was able to get high enough to see behind my eyes, above me, a night sky, with cold white stars, and feel as if I could breathe again in my own mind.

Meanwhile, by Sunday after I stopped taking the hydrocodone on Saturday, I was puking. So sick I couldn't even go to the airport to pick Gus up when he returned from two months in Peru.

On Monday, I made the MRI appointment but freaked out in the tube and had to push the button for the tech. She was annoyed, but I felt as if I had been in there for hours and hours and began to imagine that some assassin had come in and murdered everyone and that I would be trapped there forever, unable even to crawl out because my back was so fucked up.

So that was really the turning point. After the MRI, I called my doctor's office and left this long, pathetic voice mail about how sick I was, and how sorry I felt for myself, and within minutes I got a call back, an order to come in, my regular doctor was back, she plucked me out of the flood like I was a drowned kitten, shook me out, fluffed me up, licked me dry and tucked me into a metaphorical warm bed. Most important she got those damned MRI results in half an hour rather than the 24-48 hours they'd estimated. Two herniated discs, so I had good reason to be in such pain. Very scary but I was almost relieved. I had a diagnosis!

So, from then on it was a slow road back to reality. My workplace, praise them with great praise, let me work at home for two weeks, then we went to North Carolina for a week, where I was able to just lie around and not even worry about the piles of dog hair in the corners. And since then it's been better all the time.

But the thing is, during the psychotic break I stopped caring about a lot of things. Some of the things I jettisoned were sheer waste: twitter, facebook, majong tiles, hatchling (all my pets ran away and I didn't give a rat's ass). I can't even imagine getting obsessed with that shit again.

Other things are more disturbing. This was the cold breath of mortality. This was "what are you going to do for the duration?" I am not quite where I was then, but even now I am really set on trying to achieve some level of grace and dignity for the duration. This is not easy against the forces of chaos. Especially when you don't have enough money to just buy it. Buy the landscapers, the decorators, the stone masons, the painters, the ... etc.

But the most disturbing is that even though I can still write, that psychotic break seems to have locked a door between me and the well of creativity that once I could tap. Even while it was going on, I sensed this, that there was some kind of scrim behind my eyes that had once been porous, moveable, maybe just not there, but was now there and completely inert.

And in my weepy moments with Jeff or doctor Sally or various friends I'd say that maybe I was so sensitive to the opiate because I'm a writer and I have deliberately opened the channel to my subconscious. But now it's like that channel is polluted. It doesn't flow true and clear. It's laden with doubt and paranoia.

I don't quite know how to end this, because it's not ended. It just is for the time being. But when I write, I'm just writing. The spring is dry. I don't know if or when it will flow again.

First Attempt at Stained Glass

2011-07-24T17:53:00.003-05:00

Narnia on Downers

2011-07-24T17:14:00.009-05:00

In The Magicians a group of narcissistic, over-achieving teenagers (perhaps that's redundant) find themselves invited to attend a rather unappealing collegiate version of Hogwarts in upstate New York, where they remain narcissistic until they graduate and become drunks in the City. But then, one of them discovers the way to Narnia, oops, make that Fillory. They cross over into a war-torn land of talking animals and trees, manage to defeat the bad guy at the cost of one of their own. Protagonist returns to New York, where he is now a narcissistic under-achiever, until his buddies find him and off they go, back to become the kings and queen of Narnia, sorry, Fillory. And now the sequel, The Magician King, is out. I can wait.

If you want magic, try Alice Hoffman.

The list so far:

25. Deed to Death, D.B. Henson
24. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
23. Blackbird House, Alice Hoffman
22. The Treason of Isengard, Christopher Tolkien
21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Three Good 'Uns

2011-07-01T14:48:00.006-05:00

Hit a pretty rich vein in the past couple of weeks with Nos. 19-21 on the list. Lord of Misrule, the *ahem* dark horse that won the National Book Award, is a florid, self-absorbed love fest with the author's own long-ago affair with low-rent horse racing. An amazing book, but hard at first to get into because of the style, like the way it takes a few chapters to sink back into the style of Victorian novels. Dark and unsatisfying in the way life itself is, and naturally the German shepherd meets the usual fate, with a twist that makes it worse. But the characterizations of the horses, and the GSD Elizabeth, are flawless, heart-stopping.

Bent Road, a thriller sort of in the style of Jane Smiley, by Lori Roy. Devoured it. Curious facts about this book and author. Lori Roy's agent is Jenny Bent and her editor's last name is Roy. Cue Twilight Zone theme.

And finally, The Glass Castle, which lived up to my expectations. A couple of incidents, however, did strain credulity, like when she says she heard on the news of a massive tie-up in the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel, involving an escaped dog and a rattletrap car, and it turned out to have been her parents. Letting a three-year old boil hot dogs, however, I totally believed of her feckless parents.

2011 List so far.

21. Bent Road, Lori Roy
20. Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
19. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
18. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
17. Half-Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

The Black Beast: Dog or Bird?

2011-06-01T19:12:00.011-05:00

Just finished Mr. Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt. Winston Churchill's famous Black Dog rents a room from a potential client, a young librarian whose husband committed suicide. Excellent, gulped it down. I, however, better acquainted with the Black Bird that hangs around my neck at times.

2011 List so far.

17. Mr Chartwell, Rebecca Hunt
16. The Shadow of the Past, Christopher Tolkien
15. A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner
14. Protector of the Small, Squire, Tamora Pierce
11-13. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia,Megan Whalen Turner
10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
7-9 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

2011-04-30T12:16:00.003-05:00

Now reading Half Broke Horses, a "true life novel" by Jeannette Walls about her grandmother's life in the West. Calm writing about tremendously dramatic events, which is I guess how you avoid melodrama. And yet the emotion and the nuance comes flowing through. I'll now have to read her memoir, Glass Castle, which is about the author's childhood. We meet her mother in Half Broke Horses, and the set-up for disaster is clear.

2011 List so far.

10. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Brilliant Writing Prompts

2011-04-30T12:14:00.003-05:00

Donald Maass, agent and writing coach extraordinaire, has tweeted and put up on the agency website a set of absolutely kick-ass writing prompts. Read them and weep.

Reading Update

2011-04-14T12:40:00.004-05:00

Reading Skippy Dies, my birthday present from Jeff. Amazing novel set in an Irish prep school. It's like Catcher in the Rye or Oscar Wao or Prep --funny, deep and heart-breaking. Paul Murray reels off seemingly effortless swirls of perfect similes and metaphors. It's also set in very small type and is 661 pages. So there's also almost a 2666 quality to it, not only in the length and the painful beauty that makes it hard to read in big chunks. There's also something of the same wigged-out supernatural quality to it. Only, what can I say, the supernatural purple blue flame referenced in the Times review linked above? Can you guess? Boys, prep school. Flaming farts, what else.

2011 List so far.

9. Lost Horizon, James Hilton
4-8. The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir, The Demon King, The Exiled King Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

2011 Book List

2011-03-12T22:27:00.005-05:00

So far I've been in a re-reading mode.

4. The Warrior Heir, Cinda Williams Chima
3. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
2. Armadale, Wilkie Collins
1. The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton

Re-Read:
5-6 The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
1-4 The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, Lord Peter, Dorothy L Sayers

Mad Birding

2011-01-21T15:58:00.023-05:00

Photo by Gus Woods

Over New Year's we did an insane birding trip from Nashville to the Rio Grande and back. Saw 101 different species, 21 of which were brand new for me, "Life Birds," in birding parlance.

Our itinerary and trip birds seen by day (life birds in bold):

January 30: Jeff, Gus and I drive from Nashville to Little Rock. (No birds counted, we decided to start the count when we crossed the Mississippi, and it was dark by then)
January 31: We drive to Wim & Carla's ranchette in Wimberley, Texas. One spectacular moment at the Texas border when we drove beneath a line of tornadic thunderstorms, that had already killed someone farther north. Black, roiling clouds right over our heads, looked capable of whisking us off to Munchkinland. All too short. I actually loved it. (Starling, Crow, Turkey Vulture, Red-Tailed Hawk,Black Vulture,Grackle)
January 1: Rest day in Wimberley. Walked around Summer Mountain Ranch. Gorgeous windy, sunny day. First bird of the year was a life bird, Black-Crested Titmouse which I regard as highly auspicious for the year in general. (Black-Crested Tufted Titmouse,Cardinal,Carolina Chickadee,House Finch, Phoebe,Mockingbird,Eastern Bluebird)

January 2: Wimberley to Alamo, Texas, in "The Valley" as Carla tells us it's known in native parlance. The birding really took off that day. Picked up the pyrrhuloxias at the Choke River park in Three Rivers (they look like female cardinals but their crests stick up like red brushes and their bills are shorter, thicker and more curved. Then a Caracara flying along the road--a big raptor flashing black and white--as we drove back to Route 281.

Photo by Stephen Sinclair

Then at a rest stop in between the two halves of the highway at Falfurrias, we stopped and were stunned by immediately seeing a flock of green jays, in all their brilliant green, blue, yellow and black glory. One of those mind-blowing birding moments. Of course, by the end of the trip they were old news, but never not beautiful.

We checked into the Alamo Inn, a birder hotel right on the pitiful remnants of the old town square (bordered now by a giant six-lane highway). We had a wonderful two-bedroom suite, with living room and kitchen. A little funky and 1950s, but perfect. (Kestrel,Eastern Meadowlark, Osprey,Pyrrolexia, Snowy Egret,Great Egret, Great-tailed Grackle,Double-Crested Cormorant,Caracara,Green Jay,Yellow-rumped warbler,Golden-Fronted Woodpecker,Rock Dove,Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher)

Photo by Lyda Phillips

Jan. 3: We spent the morning at Santa Ana NWR, right on the Rio Grande, which we never saw, but the Border Patrol passed us on bicycles, no smiles, mirror sunglasses. The high point of that stop was the Greater Kiskadee.
Photo by Stephen Sinclair

(Santa Ana:House Sparrow,Cattle Egret,Orange-crowned warbler,Anhinga,Green Kingfisher,Greater Kiskadee,White Ibis,Pied-Billed Grebe,Least Grebe,American Bittern, Ringed Kingfisher, Blue-Winged Teal,Long-Billed Thrasher,Olive Sparrow, Ladder-Backed Woodpecker,Green Heron,Common Yellowthroat,Wild Turkey)

In the afternoon we went back west up the Rio Grande to http://www.wildtexas.com/parks/brgvsp.php, which may have been the peak of the whole trip. Unlike National Wildlife Refuges, state parks can lure the birds in with feeders throughout the area, not just at the nature center. As a consequence, we had unparalleled views of orioles, green jays, kiskadees and doves gorging on seeds and grapefruit and we could just sit on benches and watch them. Also, we got to see the giant pigeon-like chacalaca, who has been a by-word of my family for decades, ever since my father saw them in this same area, and reported that, "You just had to kick 'em out of the way!" We love saying that in all manner of situations, and there they were and indeed ...

(Bentsen SP: Chacalaca, Altimira Oriole,Black-Vented Oriole (a Mexican bird confirmed on the rare bird list); Inca Dove, Curved-Billed Thrasher,Red-Winged Blackbird,Black Phoebe,Ruby-Crowned Kinglet,Vermillion Flycatcher)

Jan. 4: We drove from Amamo over to the Laguna Altacosa NWR. Big day for raptors, like this Harris Hawk.

Photo by Stephen Sinclair

At the refuge headquarters, there were two lovely little wet areas set up as blinds for photographers. There we met photographer Stephen Sinclair, camped for the day at the gazebo with a giant telephoto lens. By the end of this day we were all getting tired and a bit cranky. Especially Jeff and Gus don't get the birder thing of screeching to a stop on a pot-holed road (Old Port Isabel Road-Fabulous spot) looking at a great fat hawk on a telephone pole, shouting "Got It" and getting back in and racing off to the next lump we spot on a pole. And we missed the Rufous-Backed Robin by 10 minutes, another rare Mexican bird, and the young Apolamado falcon. What a day though! And the sandhill cranes at the end like a parting gift! Oh, and I am nearly certain we saw a jaguarundi sneaking through the high grass from a platform along the eastern edge of the refuge (photo from Wikipedia creative commons).

(Common Black Hawk,Harris Hawk,White-Tailed Kite,Loggerhead Shrike,Merlin (taiga),Wimbrel,Northern Harrier,Couch's Kingbird,Baltimore Oriole,Coot,Great Blue Heron,Greater Yellowlegs,Willet,Little Blue Heron,Black-Bellied Plover,White Pelican,
Forster's Tern,Gull-Billed Tern,Herring Gull,Reddish Egret,Pintail,Long-Billed Curlew,Laughing Gull,Widgeon,Scaled Quail,Rough-Legged Hawk,Hermit Thrush,Brown Thrasher,Wilson's Warbler,Sandhill Crane)

Jan. 5: We parted from Wim & Carla and drove up the coast to Padre Island and Port Aransas, where I used to go when I was a little girl, before we moved to Tennessee from San Antonio, then across on the ferry and over to Fulton, where we stayed at a nice place, The Inn at Fulton Harbor, where I was befriended by the inn's resident cat, Roxie. She was a darling and made me want a cat. Long drive and limited birding but wonderful to see the Gulf. We took a good long walk on the beach.

(Semi-Palmated Plover,Ruddy Turnstone,Ring-Billed Gull,Brown Pelican,Least Sandpiper,Caspian Tern,Lesser Black-Backed Gull)

Jan. 6: The inn is right across the street from the dock where a tour boat, The Skimmer, leaves for water tours of Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where the whooping cranes winter. We made a reservation for 1 p.m. and hung around until at about 1:15 we called and learned that they'd canceled the trip because fewer than 10 people signed up. Very disappointing. And then we drove like hell,first for a lightning round at Aransas, where we got unbelievable looks at the secretive sora and bittern, I mean we were feet away from them) and then tore off again, thinking we'd just go as far as Surfside Beach on Galveston Island, but when we got there, after dark, there seemed to be nothing there, although we were briefly tricked into thinking that it was built up like Las Vegas, but what we were seeing turned out to be a completely surreal oil refinery.

So we drove on to Galveston and stayed the next two nights at the Hotel Galvez. Our birding was essentially over at this point.

(Roseate Spoonbill,Common Loon,Lesser Scaup,Black-Crowned Night Heron,Redhead,Whooping Crane,Sora,Marsh Wren)

Jan. 7: Galveston
Jan 8: New Orleans, pitched Gus out at his apartment, picked up a Glossy Ibis, for bird # 101, and beat it to Tuscaloosa, trying to outrun this terrible ice storm.
Jan. 9: Back to Nashville only about an hour ahead of the ice.

First Annual Dibby Hill Awards for Literature

2011-01-10T19:50:00.003-05:00

So, 57 books in 2010. Off my mark from last year. But some fabulous reading.

I'm inclined to pass out awards, the First Annual Dibby Hill Awards for Literature:

Most Unforgettable: Dog Boy, Eva Hornung
Best Novel: 2666, Roberto Bolona
Best Mystery/Thriller: The Girl Who Played with Fire
Best Juvenile Fiction: Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
Best Non-Fiction: The Hemmingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed

2010 List:

42. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
41. Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrar
40. Bloodroot, Amy Green
39. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
38. Shifter, Janice Hardy
37. Dog Boy, Eva Hornung
36. In the Company of Angels, William E. Kennedy
35. The Immortals, J.T. Ellison
34. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chobosky
33. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
32. Lord of the Changing Wind, Rachel Neumeir
31. The Magic Thief: Found, Sarah Prineas
30. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
29. The Magic Thief: Lost, Sarah Prineas
28. The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeir
27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
7-15 Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, Have His Carcass, Dorothy L. Sayers.
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

A Holiday Greeting

2010-12-24T16:33:00.003-05:00

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

2010 List:

41. Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrar
40. Bloodroot, Amy Green
39. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
38. Shifter, Janice Hardy
37. Dog Boy, Eva Hornung
36. In the Company of Angels, William E. Kennedy
35. The Immortals, J.T. Ellison
34. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chobosky
33. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
32. Lord of the Changing Wind, Rachel Neumeir
31. The Magic Thief: Found, Sarah Prineas
30. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
29. The Magic Thief: Lost, Sarah Prineas
28. The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeir
27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
7-15 Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, Have His Carcass.
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

I Don't See Him with a Dog

2010-11-21T22:03:00.005-05:00

I watched all of the pre-game show tonight leading up to the Eagles/Giants game. Bob Costas had an interview with Michael Vick about how his 18 months in Leavenworth Prison changed him. For the record, I loved MV when he was at Virginia Tech, I loved him when he was with the Falcons. A bit of a crush, to be honest. And then the dog fighting bust.

I actually am ready now to forgive him, under certain conditions. I could understand and believe him tonight when he told Bob Costas that he had learned patience in prison. I could believe him when he said he realized he'd cheated the Falcons, that he'd given 100 percent on the field, but not the other six and three-quarters days of the week. I could believe that he was sorry he'd broken the law, and accepted that he'd had to pay the price. I could believe that he'd actually gained maturity and strength from the experience.

What he didn't say, what no one asked, and what there were no pictures of, is whether he realized what he'd really done wrong. Whether it had really come home to him that he'd tortured dogs, that dogs are fundamentally innocent, and that he'd aided and abetted an act of diabolical cruelty. He did community service with the Humane Society, but tonight they showed a quick shot of Vick with some kids. Not a dog in sight.

Until I see Michael Vick with a dog in his arms and tears in his eyes, and he says he's sorry for what he did, can't believe he did what he did, I can't forgive him. I can't forget.

Dog Boy

2010-11-19T20:59:00.011-05:00

I finished Dog Boy by Eva Hornung last night about midnight, with a gasp. Literally.

Dog Boy is a stunning novel about a four-year-old boy in late 20th century Moscow, abandoned by first his mother, then his alcoholic uncle, as their apartment building on the outskirts of the city is abandoned. Romochko ventures out after all the food he can find is gone, but he's afraid to speak to anyone, having been warned by both mother and uncle that he must never, ever, speak to a stranger.

So, avoiding humans, nearly freezing on a warm grate, he sees a dog who looks friendly and follows her back to her lair, where she lives with her mate, their grown pups, and a new litter of puppies, with whom he suckles. For three winters Romochko lives with the dogs, as a dog, when the temperature drops to 30 below, fighting off starving wolves, The Strangers, during one particularly bitter spell. And three idyllic summers, eating rats, garbage, dodging police, stealing, begging, and playing in the lair. Until, things get ugly.

One "reviewer" on Amazon said that once you get past this utter improbability, it's a good book. However, the story is based on a real case in Moscow of Ivan Mishukov, who lived with a pack of dogs for a period of two years before being discovered in the late 1990s at age six.

Hornung also tips her pen to Romulus and Remus, with Romochko's name and the name of the kind woman at the restaurant who feeds them, Laurentia, the wife of the shepherd who "rescued" the twin founders of Rome.

The last two sentences of this novel are devastating and I've not been able to stop thinking about them since I closed the book last night. They were in my dreams, in my gut today, like an incipient plunge into clinical depression or grieving for someone I'd forgotten, until I remembered.

I know. This doesn't make you want to read this book if you haven't, but it's wonderful. Worth the pain and the conflict. And some of it was almost inevitable, fiction being what it is, but the last two lines...

This was definitely foreshadowed, mother dog modeled the behavior. Humans, from Mowgli to Lord Greystock are drawn to their own kind--like seeks like. There's even a singing woman, like the singing girl at the well who drew Mowgli out of the jungle.

The act in the last two sentences was a combination of human ruthlessness with canine pragmatism. And in a way, expressed hope for the boy, that he had chosen to become human, and knew that if any of his canine family remained, he couldn't. But the clueless academics who have "saved" him from his canine family, when they come into the room and see what he has done, what will they do? And when, if, he becomes human, how will he, how can he, cope with what he did? And of course, the question that reverberates through the whole novel is, which family is kinder, more loyal, more admirable? The answer to that is very clear: the dogs.

All of us who love dogs, and especially if we've worked with them at all as a team, know that's true. Human complexity and moral ambivalence and cruelty are all absent from the dog mind. This novel captured that so utterly, without sentimentality, without animated butterflies. This family lived a hard life, scraping a living any way they could, they fought, and squabbled and nipped at each other, observed rigid hierarchical patterns, and still managed to stay loving, loyal, and uncritical. Would that I could even get through one day, one hour, with that purity.

2010 List:

37. Dog Boy, Eva Hornung
36. In the Company of Angels, William E. Kennedy
35. The Immortals, J.T. Ellison
34. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chobosky
33. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
32. Lord of the Changing Wind, Rachel Neumeir
31. The Magic Thief: Found, Sarah Prineas
30. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
29. The Magic Thief: Lost, Sarah Prineas
28. The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeir
27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
7-15 Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, Have His Carcass.
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

No, No Nano

2010-11-01T18:45:00.007-05:00

So I am not doing NaNoWriMo because I'm concentrating on revising my middle-grade sci-fi novel, Invasion. And writing some on my current WIP, Rosalita, a YA urban paranormal.

I have gotten some fascinating feedback on Invasion from two first-rate agencies with permission to resubmit after revisions. And from Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank, and its sequels.

The feedback was hard to hear, but true. From one agency it was feedback on just the pitch paragraphs from a Webinar on how not to pitch sci-fi and fantasy. Because I was close but not there, the feedback absolutely forced me to dig deeper into what this story is really about. I had not been putting any world-building into my queries, and the webinar emphasized that you must, but that the world you've built is not the story. And you must include the things that make your world unique, but they aren't your story. And you must include your main character(s), and they are getting to your story, but they in themselves aren't your story.

Your story starts with an inciting incident, just like a screenplay, and proceeds from there, but the query should only cover the things that happen in the first 30-50 pages, and from that the agent, editor, reader, should be hooked. This is exquisitely hard.

And that's why I'm not doing NaNo. Because free-writing, writing the shitty first draft, is way too easy for me. Not maybe finishing a novel in the month, or getting to 50,000 words, but skimming along the surface. Way too easy.

I don't like hard work. I don't like to slow down. I don't like to craft every scene, every sentence. I like stuff that's easy for me, like dialogue. I like stuff to come to me and then put it in layer by layer. And that's getting closer to the real work I need to do over the next month. But I can't spend all my time on the front porch, listening to my characters talk, and seeing my world ever more clearly. Though again, that's getting closer.

I have to finally finally learn to sit down and craft the novel. Write it, as my critique partner says. See when it's shaky, rushed, repetitive, and make it better. That's hard work, but it's also really satisfying, really fun. Taking a scene and diving into it, showing (not telling) the smells, the sounds, the emotions, the clothes, the unique qualities of an imaginary world, which even a realistic novel is. And I am really looking forward to it.

And so, as the NaNo month begins, that is what I will be doing. Trying to take an almost finished 66,000 word novel and to that next level.

2010 Reading Update (49 to date):

35. The Immortals, J.T. Ellison
34. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chobosky
33. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
32. Lord of the Changing Wind, Rachel Neumeir
31. The Magic Thief: Found, Sarah Prineas
30. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
29. The Magic Thief: Lost, Sarah Prineas
28. The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeir
27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
7-14 Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise.
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Welcome Autumn! Hurry Cold Front!

2010-09-08T19:26:00.008-05:00

Arkansas Delta: High Cotton

Spring River: Perfect

Friends of my Childhood: Adorable (photos by Evette Kimbrell Chapman/September 2010)

Reading Update: Forest of Hands and Teeth: Hunger Games with zombies, that's a compliment.

Reading right now: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, awesome.

Through Sept. 21

33. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
32. Lord of the Changing Wind, Rachel Neumeir
31. The Magic Thief: Found, Sarah Prineas
30. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
29. The Magic Thief: Lost, Sarah Prineas
28. The City in the Lake, Rachel Neumeir
27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Reading Update

2010-08-16T20:43:00.005-05:00

Strange collection of stuff. Finally finished 2666, which was magnificent, wild, tortured, exotic. And it actually did all come together at the end, although without resolution, but at least the circle was completed.

The English Major was like guy lit. If hen lit is a woman getting a divorce in middle-age and suddenly finding herself, this was a guy suddenly getting a divorce in middle age having wild flings and then finding himself. Really readable, but when all was said and done I didn't really love any of the characters.

Cold Sassy Tree was strange, threads of so many things. It made me understand what the folks at Front Street Books meant when they said I should slow down my middle-grade novel Redbone.

27. Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
26. Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
25. The English Major, Jim Harrison
24. 2666, Roberto Bolona
21-23 Kept in the Dark, Nina Balatka, Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope
20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Hornets and Help

2010-06-19T19:21:00.006-05:00

So, to me The Girl Who Played with Fire was by far the best of the three. Hornet's Nest was too little Lisbeth, too much everyone else. And I was baffled that he had let drop the thread of Lisbeth's twin sister. I was sure there must have been a fourth novel, and I was right.
Since his lover hints she helped him write the novels, girl, get on it. Hard to say why these novels are so utterly compelling. Decades ago I read Knut Hamsen's Hunger. More recently but still decades ago I read Smila's Sense of Snow. The Scandinavia thing is not nearly as important here as this absolutely kickass protagonist, who is fascinating even when going to Ikea and buying mundane items.

The Help was for me very intimate, since I was raised by a black women and my mother was an unsettling force in my life. The novel didn't live up to its promise, I thought. The ending didn't deliver on the menace she had developed so well, Miss Hilly didn't get annihilated as she should have been, the narrator going to New York as the author did as well was a cop out, and I wanted some closure with Stuart. I compare The Help to Water for Elephants in that they share the same literary space, have the same degree of difficulty, a level below "literary," and yet above "commercial." Water for Elephants was more satisfying. You closed the book with a sense that every thread was snipped off, patted down, and shaken out. Perfect. The Help ended with its slip hanging down.

19. The Help, Kathleen Stockett
18. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Reading, Writing, River

2010-06-04T19:11:00.001-05:00

Oscar Wao was indeed wondrous. A little Ignatius, a little Holes, a little Victor Hugo, and something all its own. Cane fields and putas. What a great book!

With great delight got The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest and The Help. Am really pleased with myself.

Not so much with the rest of life. Slo-mo apocalypse in the Gulf. Death all around-two high school friends and the beloved grandson of another friend. Headache right now. Bitten by my own dog. Had to leave Spring River after only 27 hours because of a combination of a neurotic dog and my own neurosis. But had one perfect day.

Two good things: Finished the latest draft of my YA sci fi/fantasy novel that has been called variously Invasion and Interminable.

Launched my inflatable canoe, christened her Elessa, Lessie for short. Love her.

17. The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
16. Await Your Reply, Michael Chaon
15. The Higher Power of Lucky, Susan Patron
14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Don't Feed the Bears

2010-03-02T11:29:00.010-05:00

I rarely give money to panhandlers. I came of age in the mid-1970s when I finished college and moved to New York. That was another age of recession. New York was gritty and real and the streets of the Village, where I first lived with my actor friends, was filled with unmedicated mentally ill street people who would shout and scream at you. I mastered the no-eye-contact, strategic street crossing, and brisk walk as if I knew where I was going and was in a hurry to get there.
That has been my tactic ever since, but I have made exceptions. When I lived in D.C. I regularly gave money to a homeless guy I passed every morning who stationed himself outside a Caribou coffee shop on L Street. He had a lot of stuff around him in bags and suitcases, sat on them and held a styrofoam cup, which he would occasionally shake. He never even looked at you and if you gave him money, he would nod. I was impressed by his work ethic. He was always there in the morning, gone in the afternoon, every day, neither rain nor snow nor ice kept him from his appointed spot. I tried to imagine his life, puzzled over the territorial imperative of homeless men like him, how they kept interlopers away from what was a really prime location. The Caribou baristas gave him coffee that customers rejected for various reasons. If he wanted to go to the bathroom, he would approach the window, stand until they noticed him and nodded that it was all right for him to come in. Sitting on that corner was his job, he did it faithfully and with dignity, and he deserved his meager salary.
At that same Caribou Coffee, Jeff observed a fabulous moment of Christmas charity.

Then there’s Nashville, where any help to the homeless is met with furious reactions from the lowest level of mean-spirited shitheads. “As long as these bums are off the sidewalk and away from the working public and the responsible public any place they are put is fine with me. (As long as there is a fence around it),” one fine fellow responded to an article on homelessness.

In Nashville I am rarely even asked for money by homeless people downtown. Once a sad looking man approached me in the parking garage on Commerce Street and politely asked me for money. I had 75 cents in my pocket and I gave it to him and he blessed me. It was a profound moment. I felt uplifted, as if I had experienced the divine link between the mendicant monks in India and those who put food in their begging bowls.
All of these encounters with homeless people have made my life richer, but the business community, who launched this "Don't Give" campaign, are hypersensitive to any tiny defect that might mar the image of glorious Nashville, things a city like New York, D.C., or LA would just expect people to get over. The police even harass the homeless people who sell The Contributor, which is a legitimate paper, reads as well as the daily paper, and on which homeless people work, and work hard.
And now this message: Don’t Give (it just encourages them).
How close that is to Feed a Bear/Kill a Bear (because bears who are habituated to human handouts have to be destroyed).

Reading Update

2010-02-26T13:50:00.002-05:00

The Hemmingses of Monticello is a rich and provocative study of race, family, slavery, paternalism, and history. It read like a novel only in the sense that one's imagination fills in, or tries to, all the mind-boggling inconsistencies of Jefferson and his time in history. My brain nearly exploded in the first chapter when Annette Gordon-Reed started throwing the relationships at you like water bombs. Everyone was related, black white and mixed. All of them were connected. And yet Jefferson seemed deeply, genuinely hurt when some of his wife's enslaved brothers wanted to be free more than they wanted all that Jefferson could and did give them. He literally couldn't understand it. And yet he wrote passionately for the intrinsic rights of man. He had a common-law lasting relationship with Sally Hemmings and yet he truly believed that blacks were inherently inferior. The contradictions are baffling, fascinating, horrifying. The one criticism I have of this fine history is that she tends to set up straw men and knock them down one by one, and then conclude if it wasn't any of those things, it "stands to reason" or "doubtless" was her theory. I often thought her list of possibilities was terribly limited when you consider the amazing complexity of human relations.

I've been reading The Book Thief for months but it's so terribly good I can't bear to read it for the pain and the fear of more pain to come.

Ditto with The Higher Power of Lucky. I don't know why I keep putting that one down. It's wonderful, wonderful.

14. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,Katherine Howe
13. Dragon Haven, Robin Hobb
12. The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed
11. Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

reread:
1-6 Rune Blade Trilogy, Sword in Exile Trilogy, Ann Marston

Homage to the Sit-Ins

2010-02-26T13:30:00.005-05:00

Fifty years ago a handful of black students in North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee, sat down at lunch counters and demanded service. Thereby bringing Jim Crow to its knees in the segregated South.

I've been fortunate to write about this era for several publications this month and last. So as Black History Month draws to a close, here are links to those stories.

Here is a review of a new book about the Civil Rights generation, through the lens of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the lives of its leaders.

This is an earlier story about defacement of a mural honoring the Freedom Riders.

A story about a reenactment of the Nashville Sit-Ins.

And a story in the Nashville City Paper about the 50th Anniversary of the Sit-Ins.

Writing Contest

2010-02-11T14:27:00.003-05:00

Great new contest for writers of juvenile fiction. The great agent Jennifer Laughran, of Andrea Brown Literary Agency, will read the first 150-200 words of your complete novel and offers a critique of the first 25 pages to the winner, and first 10 pages to two runners-up.

Great opportunity! Grab it.

Books, Stuff

2010-02-10T14:24:00.004-05:00

So many things.

Who dat?

Snow.

Cold.

Woodstock, thank you Robin and Katie. Photo by Robin using my cell phone

New York, thank you Ginny, Greg and Bill-and Sophie.Photo by Virginia

New Jersey, the ancestral estate, la familia.

Such a delight.

Here's the reading list so far.

Reading The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak

7-10. The Spellman Files, The Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again, Lisa Lutz
6. Bardo: Interval of Possibility, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
5. Booked to Die, John Dunning
4. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larson
2. Beautiful Creatures
1. The Silver Mage, Katherine Kerr

2009 Reading List

2010-01-05T16:17:00.004-05:00

Well, here's how the 2009 Reading List wrapped up, 83 total, 28 new and 56 re-reads. Indicates a year of seeking more comfort than novelty:

28. Dragon Keeper, Robin Hobb
27. Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle
26. Dreadful Sorry, Kathryn Reiss
25. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
24. Song for the Basilisk, Patricia McKillip
23. Children of Green Knowe, L.M. Boston
22. Golden Fool, Robin Hobb
21.Black, White and Dead All Over, John Darden
20-22 Liveship Trilogy: Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny, Robin Hobb
18-19 Forest Mage & Renegade's Magic, Robin Hobb
17. Shaman's Crossing, Robin Hobb
16. The Book of Murder, Guillermo Martinez
15. The Likeness, Tana French
14. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
13. Tales of Old Whitehaven, Leigh Anne McCorkle
12. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson
11. In the Woods, Tana French
10. Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kaye (should have been published as YA)
9. The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
8. What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Law
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
48-56. Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, Rilla of Ingleside.
46-47 Fool's Errand, Fool's Fate, Robin Hobb
45. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
36-44 Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Carney's House Party, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding, Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace
30-35 Betsy-Tacy, Betsy Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Winona's Pony Cart, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Maud Hart Lovelace
24-29 The five books in The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7.

Mardi Gras Indian Queen

2009-12-02T10:28:00.003-05:00

When I was in New Orleans in 2001 for the AAN convention, I first learned about the Mardi Gras Indians and have been fascinated by them ever since, have collected books and images of them and after Katrina I mourned and wept because I was afraid they had washed away with the storm waters. I should have had more faith. It takes more than a big storm to drown a tradition so rich.

The Death of Nano

2009-11-30T12:00:00.006-05:00

Well, I am not going to "win" Nano this year. I am at 37,611 and that is where I take my stand. That's a lot of words, and I have made tremendous progress on two separate projects, but STILL have not finished either one. One is a revision and I completely rewrote the last seven chapters during Nano and am at the last, the bitter end, where everything is revealed and all the threads wrapped up and I'm still staring at it going, OK, where are the character arcs, how should I reveal who is the king, should I kill Zaza?

Stuck, staring, daydreaming, I can't even make a decent list or outline, because it's not coming to me at all. I will now take all I have written (rewritten) back into the original document, catch up with the feedback I got from my crit partners in October, and see if I can creep up on the ending and surprise it before it has a chance to destroy me with its basilisk stare.

In the other one, I am even less forwarder. But I have 20,000 words where before there was naught. And not only that, I like them. I have a bit of an outline to take me into the second half of the middle, although I suspect the ending with wrap me in its deathly coils before I know it.

I am very satisfied with what Nano did for me this year. I did not write for the sake of word count. I like what I've got now and I wouldn't be this far along with either project without the peer pressure and delights of widget updating.

And in the meanwhile I did not miss any work writing deadlines, made some money, had a fantastic Thanksgiving with the returning prodigal son. We went to see This Is It, and stayed up until 1 a.m. looking at and singing along to MJ videos and then Marvin Gaye, Percy Sledge and countless other classic R&B artists. When did we become such good friends? It's utterly fabulous. I never even knew that his three girl friends from high school (who are still his BFFs) were huge Michael Jackson fans, though I was aware that he and they did the Thriller dance for a powder puff cheerleader thing senior year.

What is winning Nano to that? I ask you.

Want This Bookstore in MY Neighborhood

2009-11-30T11:12:00.002-05:00

This London bookstore seems like an earthly paradise. I even want that perfume.

Be Thankful for the Sky

2009-11-25T10:37:00.006-05:00

I guess we do indeed have much to be thankful for.

I was doing my horse volunteer work Friday and when going through any gates, the instructor asked the little girls whose horses we were leading to say what they were thankful for.

The first time the little girl I was leading said, "Humm, Lucky?" the horse she was riding, and that was good for the instructor.

And the second time my little girl said, "Oh, I don't know, the sky?"

And the instructor was like, "The sky? Is that all you can think of to be thankful for?"

I was outraged but kept it to myself.

I myself am quite thankful for the sky. We should all be thankful for the sky.

Day Four: 7,175

2009-11-04T12:14:00.001-05:00

Fourth day of Nano and I'm just simmering along at just above the daily minimums. My total is 7,175 of Rosalita, my urban paranormal YA novel.

I have a lot of paid work right now, which is tough because I have trouble concentrating on any of it fully, or Nano, or anything really. I just feel inefficient.

Reading Update:

22. Golden Fool, Robin Hobb
21.Black, White and Dead All Over, John Darden
20-22 Liveship Trilogy: Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny, Robin Hobb
18-19 Forest Mage & Renegade's Magic, Robin Hobb
17. Shaman's Crossing, Robin Hobb
16. The Book of Murder, Guillermo Martinez
15. The Likeness, Tana French
14. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
13. Tales of Old Whitehaven, Leigh Anne McCorkle
12. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson
11. In the Woods, Tana French
10. Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kaye (should have been published as YA)
9. The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
8. What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Law
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
46-47 Fool's Errand, Fool's Fate, Robin Hobb
45. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
36-44 Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Carney's House Party, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding, Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace
30-35 Betsy-Tacy, Betsy Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Winona's Pony Cart, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Maud Hart Lovelace
24-29 The five books in The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7.

What a Writer Is Up Against

2009-09-15T19:29:00.002-05:00

This is a brilliant assessment of the publishing industry today. The most chilling to me is number 4: if you are lucky enough to hit the target: "the corporation will see a spike in your profit and sort of autistically, or at least automatically, raise the profit goal for your division by some corporately predetermined amount for the following year."

The other chilling thing is that my husband, one of the readers Mr. Menaker prizes the most--the one who buys hard-cover literary novels when they first come out, before they've won the Booker or the National Book Award--asked for a Kindle. I didn't know what to say. But I said a lot anyway. Or maybe I didn't. I think I held up a book, ran my finger along its cover, opened it, sniffed the glue wafting up from its sturdy spine. He said, "I know, but I can buy a new book for $9."

And as a writer who has been pursuing publication for so damned long, these are hard things to hear, although I have heard them before and before and all the time. But but but

I write to keep my soul alive, and hope springs eternal.

Female Archetypes: The Divine Feminine

2009-09-15T10:27:00.021-05:00

I am puzzling over female archetypes again in preparing for Nano. My WIP has mythic elements and I've been doing research, reading parts of The White Goddess, The Golden Bough, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I am troubled that female archetypes, and the feminine spiritual journey, are almost universally defined by their relationship to men, or male gods.

Robert Graves defines the elemental feminine archetype in The White Goddess as the three-faced female principle--lover, mother, crone. He describes the great war between matriarchal earth goddess religions and the patriarchal religions that won the war and have ever since stamped down any reemergence of raw feminine power.

This strikes an elemental chord in my soul. When the hero begins his journey it has absolutely no reference to the feminine. He goes on a spiritual journey to save the world. There is no equivalent heroic female quest.

As a writer I'm looking for those stories of the feminine that have the mythic power of the hero's journey that George Lucas tapped in Star Wars.

Reading Robin Hobb recently I can see how she's drawing on mythic female archetypes, as have other fantasy writers with female warriors, like Elizabeth Moon or Robin McKinley, or writers like Patricia McKillip or Gregory Maguire, who have been retelling the great fairy tales--like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and Snow White.

Amongst the gooey new age-y drivel online about wolves and Lemuria, there is some marginally useful stuff for writers beyond Freud and Jung and the Myers-Briggs test. For example, this listing of male and female archetypes. In 2000 I went to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in Colorado Springs and the romance writers there had a similar list to the third one here. The one that has stuck with me ever since was "The Plucky Kid," or I think the Colorado group may have called her "The Buddy," the character played by Terri Garr or Jean Arthur, "come on, you can do it!" But who is she buddy to, who is she encouraging?

Thelma and Louise was so powerful because this was a female buddy movie. But once again, see, they launched their journey because of an attempt by the male to subjugate and dominate the feminine. Their journey ended with their own self-destruction. There was only one way out of the labyrinth and that was to jump off the mountain. They refused to submit to the masculine construct.

Like Anna Karenina who struggled for self-actualization and despaired. In fact, all those great 19th century novelists saw woman's predicament clearly. They brought their women to full, rounded, passionate and thoughtful life but could not bring them safely out of the labyrinth.

Or Fried Green Tomatoes, two women who love each other and protect each other and try to live independent fulfilled lives without the constant threat of men, in this case by quietly eliminating the male threat.

When a woman tries to escape, she cannot shake her male-referenced plight until she becomes the crone, the wise woman, the repository of tribal knowledge, like Jessica Tandy in Fried Green Tomatoes, beyond the lure and trap of sexuality. Or unless she bears a sickle and spills the bull's blood to make the earth flower, as Mary Stuart Masterson did as Izzy.

My friend and writing partner Susan and I worked with the Celtic selkie myth in our screenplay, Never Touched Her. The selkie is a shape-changing seal, who comes out of the ocean one night to sit on the rocks and change to a woman. A fisherman sees her and steals her skin, so that she cannot change back to a seal and return to the sea. She goes to his home, keeps his house, bears his children, until one night she finds her skin, and without a backward glance, leaves his house, abandons her children and returns to the sea, like Ibsen's A Doll's House. Another powerful example of the universality of myth that Campbell, Graves, and Frazer all elucidate.

The Greek goddesses, like the gods, were jealous, lustful, vengeful, generous at times, fickle. Artemis is a nice archetype, the huntress, the virgin, although of course the male is always hunting her, tempting, trapping, her with silver apples. It's interesting that Athena, wisdom, is a goddess, not a god, and not yet a crone. The Greek gods certainly think with their manhood for the most part. Aphrodite, of course, love, sex, beauty, fertility. Persephone, the embodiment of the rape and captivity of the female principle. Demeter, earth goddess. I am just rambling now.

I just googled female archetypes images. Pretty interesting. Marilyn Monroe, another Anna Karenina. A sexy nurse. A girl sucking a candy.

This anime one is the waif as white goddess perhaps? Anime in general seems turned on by waifs with super powers. In fact, what about female superheroes, like Storm? The White Goddess for sure.

Oooh, check it out. Sigorney Weaver in Alien. Angry mothers in a fight to the death. I love it! Now that's what I've been looking for!

This divine feminine principle is the mythic essence of ardent female friendship. And every actualized thoughtful woman I know attests to the power of those friendships. Like The Four of Us, best friends from college--Susan, Eva, Ginny and me. Or the passionate friendship of the women who went to Camp Miramichee as girls, where we learned to succeed or fail on our own merits and with our own strength and wits without any reference to men whatsoever.

Lionesses hunt while the male lions lie around and roar occasionally, when they're not eating their rivals' cubs. We should all tap our inner lioness and come roaring our of the dark night of the soul, ready to hunt.

Reading Update:

20-22 Liveship Trilogy: Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny, Robin Hobb
18-19 Forest Mage & Renegade's Magic, Robin Hobb
17. Shaman's Crossing, Robin Hobb
16. The Book of Murder, Guillermo Martinez
15. The Likeness, Tana French
14. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
13. Tales of Old Whitehaven, Leigh Anne McCorkle
12. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson
11. In the Woods, Tana French
10. Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kaye (should have been published as YA)
9. The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
8. What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Law
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
45. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
36-44 Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Carney's House Party, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding, Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace
30-35 Betsy-Tacy, Betsy Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Winona's Pony Cart, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Maud Hart Lovelace
24-29 The five books in The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7.

Indie Bookstores

2009-09-15T10:00:00.011-05:00

I have just returned from my annual camp reunion in Hardy, Ark., and was stunned and gratified to learn that a bookstore, coffee-shop, restaurant, caterer (they catered our Saturday night dinner) had opened. Words, and Afterwords.

This summer I have done a little short-haul traveling and made it a point to visit independent bookstores: Malaprops in Asheville, N.C., Lemuria in Jackson, Tenn. This is another aspect of the love affair with books that never fades. The excitement of seeing stacks of books, a section in Lemuria for Eudora Welty, a bookseller actually handselling when a customer asked for a good book to read at the beach, and she wasn't guiding him to Nora Roberts, but to the revolving shelf of recent literary releases. I recommended Netherland.

Booksellers who stock random Trollopes.

Reading Update

2009-08-20T14:31:00.004-05:00

I'm still in the midst of this rich streak of upmarket mysteries. I'm reading the second Tana French novel now, The Likeness, which I like better than In the Woods, although it too is just a bit long-winded. There's a definite Donna Tartt, The Secret History, flavor to it. I love the tension.

This streak has made me go back and add a feral cat throughline to Meditations of an Animist, which is with two agents now, although it's probably the kiss of death for me to say so.

14. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
13. Tales of Old Whitehaven, Leigh Anne McCorkle
12. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson
11. In the Woods, Tana French
10. Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kaye (should have been published as YA)
9. The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
8. What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Law
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
36-44 Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Carney's House Party, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding, Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace
30-35 Betsy-Tacy, Betsy Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Winona's Pony Cart, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Maud Hart Lovelace
24-29 The five books in The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7.

Tomato Arts Fest

2009-08-09T11:08:00.005-05:00

Trendy East Nashville has a quirky arts festival every summer--the Tomato Art Festival. An ode to the tomato. Went yesterday. Very very hot. Interesting dogs. Bought a little T-shirt for $3. Came home. But took a couple of pictures with my phone and then photoshopped them. I am loving this newfound tool for making crappy pix look cool. Click on the pictures if you want to see them larger and in all their glory.

Reading Update

2009-07-23T09:30:00.001-05:00

I'm think that in addition to the books I've been listing, which are all books I've actually finished, I should list the books I start and don't finish for one reason or another. Like Secret Life of Bees is sitting on the nightstand because I can't make myself read the terrible part I sense is coming up in the next chapter. I should just get over it, because I'm 640 pages into 2666 and really terrible stuff happens, but Bolona's style is so mesmerizing and dispassionate that it's more like a dream than Bees, which is terribly personal somehow. That's part of the genius of 2666, he draws you into the dream where the lives of women don't matter. Where a few individuals struggle to the surface and gasp air, but are eventually sucked back down into the murk. And how can something this strange and awful be so readable? I'll devour 150 pages a night. I did stop for months though and then picked it back up.

And I've picked up a couple of other new authors at the library, writing literate mystery, which is where Meditations of an Animist, my latest novel would fall on a bookstore shelf. And put them down for one reason or another. It's a chilling lesson. How hard it is to fire a reader. How little time you have to do it.

9. The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
8. What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Law
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, epic fantasy.
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
36-44 Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Carney's House Party, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding, Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace
30-35 Betsy-Tacy, Betsy Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Winona's Pony Cart, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Maud Hart Lovelace
24-29 The five books in The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7. Amazing how little I remembered of Deathly Hallows.

G4 - 1 or Swimming at the Biltmore

2009-07-07T13:43:00.020-05:00

We just returned from our latest G4 summit, the occasional coming together of my three best friends from college and myself. This year our legal eagle Eva couldn't come, but Susan, Ginny and I spent a glorious few days at the White Gate Inn in Asheville, N.C.

We had a whole little house to ourselves, which was composed of the two-bedroom Joyce Kilmer suite and the one-bedroom Oscar Wilde. Can you imagine how much the two of them would have hated each other? But both were pet friendly, so we hauled along my 95-pound Shiloh Shepherd, El Cid.

From the get-go, this was highly fraught and terribly amusing. For example, at every possible transition, including slowing down or turning on the windshield wipers, Cid began to whirl, screech and trumpet like an elephant. Seriously. A god-awful racket. And when he tried to jump into the front seat and Ginny's lap, it was dramatic indeed, especially because we were going 80 mph through Davenport Gap in the Smokies.

But we were flying across Tennessee and North Carolina to check into the inn and then go to Charlotte to pick Susan up at the airport when around Crossville, Tenn., I realized I'd made a critical miscalculation.

"Oh, no, I just remembered something," I said.
"Is it bad?" Ginny asked.
"Oh, yeah." I'd forgotten the change to eastern time which made us two hours late picking Susan up, since I'd also miscalculated the distance to Charlotte. I cannot be trusted. It's clear.

But we finally were reunited and at one point I looked back and Susan had her head pillowed on Cid's back and was crooning to him. She's been dogless for a while and was clearly starved for doggish affection.

The next day we went to the Biltmore gardens. With Cid.

Which was ridiculous, but we did. It was blazing, blazing hot, and poor Cid kept drinking from and then jumping into every elegant formal fountain we passed. Some people beamed at him; others totally gave us the death stare. And everyone had to stop and pet him and ask what kind of dog he was until I felt like a Chatty Cathy doll: pull a string and "The Shiloh Shepherd was bred from old line German shepherds ..." recording played.

At one point we were walking down the middle of one of the estate's walled gardens, where banks of lavender hung down, booming with bees, when a woman came toward us shouting, "Is that a working dog?" I allowed that Cid was indeed a "retired" working dog, which is a nice way of saying that he trained as a search and rescue dog for a year and washed out and then herded sheep for another year and a half before his handler (me) decided we really couldn't go much farther without totally disgracing ourselves (which, by the way, is still I think the farthest a Shiloh has gone in herding). So I guess I wasn't really exaggerating.

"How could you tell?" I asked her. "I can just tell," she said. And we proceeded to have a very nice chat with her and her roommate. She had Delta Society Rottweiler therapy dogs.

And believe me, Cid really worked that day. He wants me to tell you just how hard it is to keep a flock of three women together. If I got ahead of Susan and Ginny, he'd walk in front of me and stop me, then look back anxiously, encouragingly, to get the other two moving. If we were close together, he wound himself around our legs. If they got ahead, he dragged me like a cart horse until we caught up.

Finally we started back toward the car and hadn't passed a fountain in a while. Cid was dragging; his tongue was lolling out of his mouth. So when we came to one of the main large terraced gardens with three giant formal circular ponds in the middle, I decided to let Cid have a drink.

I approached the fountain and before I knew it, Cid had jumped in and was up to his neck in water with a three foot stone curb above him and a look of total panic on his furry face. I screeched and Susan and I began to haul his heavy dripping, yipping, ass out of the fountain, while Ginny struggled in vain to find a point of purchase. It was all over in a few seconds, but we figured Cid had helped us establish our place as unrepentant revolutionaries. And imagined Edith saying to George, "Dear, I believe I see a large furry beast in the far pond."

We sneaked back to the car along a balustraded walk that had yet MORE fountains, lower and safer and each one sampled by Cid.

And that is the tale known now and forevermore as Swimming at the Biltmore.

Photos courtesy of Virginia Dzurinko, artist and musician

Filling in the Blanks

2009-06-18T10:27:00.005-05:00

Our backyard is enclosed by a seven-foot privacy fence, the kind that alternates planks so that there is a narrow gap between each. On one side, our neighbors have two dogs who participate in vigorous fence-barking and running with our two dogs, especially 95-pound Cid, who learned this game from Kismet, the next-door dog back in Maryland.

After a few months, I noticed that as they all raced up and down the fence line I was seeing what I thought at first was Pongo's shadow through the fence. A few weeks later I realized, no, I was seeing Pongo's entire body, because my brain was creating a whole out of the pieces, like an animated film.

It reminded me of something my friend Michael Cook said after 9/11 when I sent him that famous photograph of the smoke pouring out of the top of one of the towers in the shape of the devil's face. He claimed he couldn't see the devil's face in the smoke, but said the human mind is constantly seeking to create order out of chaos.

So, I wonder how Cid senses Pongo. Probably as a vast odor and sound of barking and flash of white teeth (his nose is constantly slightly scratched now). Maybe that's why if he sees her in her front yard when he is on the front porch, he resolutely looks in the opposite direction. There are rigid conventions in dogdom and the fence game is one of them. What happens along the fence stays along the fence.

And what happens when we humans fill in the blanks, stays with us, even when it's really not the devil coming out of the World Trade Center, even when it's wrong, even when it's right.

Video: VUCast Commencement 2009: Watch the 40-year journey of one graduate

2009-05-30T17:21:00.001-05:00

Video: VUCast Commencement 2009: Watch the 40-year journey of one graduate

Posted using ShareThis

It's Been a Long Time Coming, But a Change Gonna Come

2009-05-30T17:20:00.005-05:00

Please watch this wonderful segment from Vanderbilt University's News Network, produced by my great friend Emily Pearce, about how Taylor Stokes, the first black football player to come to Vanderbilt on an athletic scholarship, was unable to finish school because of the depression and isolation he experienced. Now, 40 years later, he received his degree.

http://www.youtube.com/vanderbilt

He would have a lot to talk about with Eddie Russell, the hero of my Mr Touchdown, wouldn't he?

Reading Update

2009-05-04T13:20:00.003-05:00

Reading Update: Odd coincidence, just read The Magic Thief and Savvy, two top middle-grade novels, both fantasy, and both use this sort of off-putting style in places, of doubling words, like soggy boggy (Savvy) and black dark (Thief). It was most marked in Savvy and it took me a while to adjust to the style, but then I liked it. Read each in one day.

7. The Magic Thief, Sarah Prineas
6. Savvy, Ingrid Lawq
5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, epic fantasy.
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
8-23 All 16 books in Mazo de la Roche's Jalna series
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7. Amazing how little I remembered of Deathly Hallows.

Great New Books

2009-04-03T10:05:00.006-05:00

Two of my dear friends have books coming out this month: Kate Marsh and Lynne Berry.

Kate's newest, The Twilight Prisoner, launches April 7. It's a sequel to The Night Tourist, which was a modern retelling of Orpheus and Euridyce, set in the ghostly underworld beneath Manhattan. Twilight Prisoner takes the story of Jack Perdu, a classics prodigy, and Euri, his ghostly best friend, a step forward, woven around the myth of Persephone and Eros. Publisher's Weekly gives The Twilight Prisoner a starred review and Kirkus raves, "The plot is lavishly draped with snappy dialogue, realistic teen characters and didn't-see-it-coming twists. An outstanding story with wide appeal."

Lynne's Duck Tents is the third in her series of picture books illustrated by Hiroe Nakata. This time the darling ducks go camping. "In a small backyard, by a squat stone fence, five little ducks pitch five duck tents." You've got to love it.

A Mess, a Gem, and Comfort Books

2009-04-01T12:37:00.016-05:00

All right, I know I am arriving years late at the party, but I have to vent. At the recommendation of fellow writers on Verla Kaye's Blue Board, I recently started George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy Song of Ice and Fire series. First three books were ripping yarns,not the best fantasy I've ever read, but really good. Then comes the fourth, A Feast for Crows. Fool that I am, because this was a pretty old series (FFC was published in 2005) and that it had been highly recommended on the blue board, I thought it was finished. Bwahahahahaha!

First of all, A Feast for Crows is nearly unreadable. Unlike the first three, I kept putting it down, even reading whole other books, and then coming back to it. It literally meanders on and on (i.e., the characters are all on walkabouts), abandoning all my favorite characters (Danerys the dragon queen, Tyrion the dwarf, Bran the mystic wolf clan survivor and his bastard half-brother Jon Snow) to poke along with the least likeable and interesting characters for 500 f-ing pages. I'm thinking, how the devil is he going to wrap this up in the remaining...I check again the monstrous page count and see I only have about 200 pages of actual text left. Then we have the 100 pages or so of appendices listing everyone ever mentioned and their affiliations, and I'm so bloody bored, I even flip through some of this for a bit, and then to my horror, I find the fatal final few pages. A freaking preview of book five!

Furious, I race to Amazon to find that even though the novel I'm reading was published in 2005, book five isn't due out until this September. FOUR YEARS. To wait for the conclusion of a series that has pooled into a slab of melted butter. And then I discovered the voluminous threads of fury on Amazon. I am so mad. I slam the book shut. I will return it uncompleted to the library (thank GOD I didn't buy it). The speculation is that GRRM is a) senile, b) arrogant, c) undisciplined, d) suffers from Robert Jordanitis (named for the fantasy novelist who died 12 books into his series that showed no signs of wrapping up even after 12,000 pages); or e) (my choice) all of the above.

And you know what's the real pisser? It doesn't matter. The forthcoming Dance with Dragons is already, six months out, ranked at 1300 on Amazon, which I can tell you means best-seller. So it doesn't MATTER whether he finishes this stupid series in five books or 20. It doesn't MATTER whether he's so arrogant and self-indulgent that he just goes on auto-pilot and pours out stupid drivel. He will still sell books and can be as complacent and undisciplined as he likes and smile all the way to the bank.

Okay, I'm taking a deep breath. I'm letting it go. I am turning to the light.

To get over the above, I picked up Neil Gaiman's Coraline last night and read it in a couple of hours. A jewel. Finely written, beautifully conceived and admirably executed. Thanks, Neil.

And the books I turned to while trying to struggle through A Feast for Crows? I returned to Jalna, the Canadian estate conceived by Mazo de la Roche in the 1940s, about a vivid, eccentric family and their ups and downs. Such comfort food. I still love them and I must have read them every one five times when I was a teenager and in my 20s. I haven't read them in decades but they hold up for me.

5. Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4-4.5 A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, George RR Martin
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, epic fantasy.
1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.

Re-read.
8-10 Building of Jalna, Morning at Jalna, Mary Wakefield, Mazo de la Roche
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7. Amazing how little I remembered of Deathly Hallows.

March Madness

2009-03-21T12:50:00.003-05:00

I am so hot. I'm 51 in the New York Times brackets. That's way better than any of their f-ing staffers! This is the best I've ever done in a NCAA bracket. I picked Sienna, Dayton, USC, Western Kentucky, and Wisconsin for upsets.

2009 Reading List

2009-03-14T12:15:00.002-05:00

It's been a long, cold winter and I've been in a comfort mode. So mostly re-reading or reading the literary equivalent of Cheetos and chocolate croissants.

Read:

1. Jennie, The Romantic Years, the first volume of an old biography of Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother, an American.
2-3. A Game of Thrones, and AClash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, epic fantasy.

Re-read.
1-7 Harry Potter, 1 through 7. Amazing how little I remembered of Deathly Hallows.

Rococo

2009-02-22T18:16:00.002-05:00

A bit of good news! The screenplay I've been writing for the past couple of years with my BFF Susan Baronoff (Emmy-award-winning reality TV writer and producer) placed in the semi-finals (top 20) of a major screenwriting contest, Acclaim Films. This is absolutely fantastic.

Check out more about the contest and the screenplay.

I Am, A Man: Black History Month

2009-01-28T14:52:00.010-05:00

My husband recently wore to work the "I Am, A Man" T-shirt he had purchased last year at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. He works mostly with 20-somethings and they were all baffled by the slogan. We were baffled by their bafflement but shouldn't have been. The civil rights era is rapidly fading into the remote past and we have elected our first African-American president.

Yet this slogan still gives me chills. That in my lifetime, growing up as I did in Memphis, black sanitation workers would demand to be treated simply as men. "Garbage men" in Memphis at that time made 25 cents an hour. The white man's dogs chased and bit them. At night, when they went home, they shook maggots from rotting garbage out of their clothes.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis in 1968 to support the sanitation workers strike, which escalated in late March after a policeman shot and killed a black striker. On April 4, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. As the news went out that night, black communities across America went up in flames.

I have written about growing up during desegregation in my novel Mr. Touchdown. And I've also blogged about the time I was caught up in the March Against Fear and had a face-to-face moment with Stokely Carmichael.

But few middle-grade or young adult novels deal with that turbulent period in American history. Many kids today are so beyond racism that skin color is almost meaningless for them. And they find novels about "the black problem" preachy and depressing. I can get with that, yet ...

It's a cliche to quote George Santayana for the millionth time that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But it's true. And perhaps this era is becoming so remote that readers, students of history, can once again reverberate to the passion of that plea: I Am, A Man.

In the deep South in the 1950s and 1960s, a white man had the right to vote; a black man did not. A black man could not eat with white men, could not use whites-only restrooms, could not sit in the same waiting rooms in the train station with white people, could not send his children to school with white children. The injustice of this is incomprehensible now. Isn't it?

In the course of writing and visiting schools and book festivals with Mr. Touchdown, I have collected this list of novels for young readers that deal with Black History Month topics.

Let's keep reading about the past, lest we forget and are doomed to repeat it.

A New Era

2009-01-21T13:00:00.005-05:00

Immediately after PEBO (President-elect Barack Obama) became POTUS, when he spoke the words, "So help me God," I sounded my Tibetan singing bowl four times, for myself and the three dear friends who gave me the bowl. We had agreed that we would all ring the bells for Obama, along with thousands of others across America.

And of course, that made me think of Edgar Allan Poe. So not having words sufficient to express how deeply I feel about this change of power, I give you the wedding bell portion of "The Bells," since this is a form of marriage, of a people to a leader,

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

Not Sure It's a Happy New Year

2009-01-07T10:15:00.005-05:00

So a new year has begun and it doesn't feel like it. I am oppressed by the economy, by the rain. We didn't put up a Christmas tree for the first time in our married life, in Gus's life. I did not eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. My Christmas wreath is still on the front of the house, though I did take down all the decorations inside before I went down to Atlanta to spend New Year's Eve with my friend from the second grade and her family and friends. That was delightful although I was a bit reduced by the celebration the next day driving home. I fear the economy. We both had stomach viruses. I am troubled by a vast sense of dread, mitigated only by the upcoming inauguration.

My last two books of the year were A Lion Among Men, the third in the Wicked series, and I think my favorite so far. The Cowardly Lion was always one of my favorite Oz characters. And The Hearts of Horses, which Jeff so wisely gave me. Wonderful book, almost as good as Water for Elephants, until the author stopped focusing on the horses to tell the human stories and started focusing solely on the people. Without the horses to deepen the metaphors it became more mundane, but still, a lovely book.

29. The Hearts of Horses, Molly Gloss
28. A Lion Among Men, Gregory Maguire
27. What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe
26. Night of the Soul Stealer, Joseph Delaney
25. Brisingr, Christopher Paolini
21-24. Heaven's Net Is Wide, Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass for His Pillow, The Brilliance of the Moon, Lian Hearn
20. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
19. A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
18. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
17. The Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
16. The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr
15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

16-20. The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister, The Duke's Children, Can You Forgive Her, Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope,
13-15. LOTR, three volumes.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Coming Down to the Wire

2008-12-22T11:19:00.005-05:00

So I'm drawing to the close of 2008 and I am catching up on the reading list. I think I may have forgotten one or two in the chaos of moving, but the total right now is 47 read or re-read which is darned close to a book a week. And I still have two weeks to go.

What Hath God Wrought was a fascinating 900-page survey of American history from 1812 to 1848. Howe's book was chosen to fill this gap in the Oxford University series on American History, after his former professor, Charles Sellers', survey of the same period, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, was rejected. Throughout, Howe writes snide footnotes to Sellers' work, usually in sections most critical of Andrew Jackson. Like many historians, Sellers lionizes Jackson for his populism and support for the democratization of American society against the elitism of the New England monied classes. By contrast, Howe sees Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats as white supremacists who practiced genocide on every ethnic group they encountered in the western expansion. The book was so fascinating to me because I have always been much more interested in international history than American, yet I have all these vague notions of the events of this period. WHGW filled in that impressionist canvas with concrete details--a constant refrain of "I never knew that." The heroes of WHGW are John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, whom Howe lauds for resisting slavery, Indian removal, and the Mexican War. Howe, who has also written a history of the Whigs, credits them for promoting federalism, infrastructure improvements, including public education, and emancipation rather than ruthless expansionism. Very compelling.

27. What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe
26. Night of the Soul Stealer, Joseph Delaney
25. Brisingr, Christopher Paolini
21-24. Heaven's Net Is Wide, Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass for His Pillow, The Brilliance of the Moon, Lian Hearn
20. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
19. A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
18. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
17. The Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
16. The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr
15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

16-20. The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister, The Duke's Children, Can You Forgive Her, Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope,
13-15. LOTR, three volumes.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Agnes the Commodious

2008-12-17T16:25:00.010-05:00

We have named our new house in Nashville Agnes. This connotes to both of us a kind, patient, capable female entity, who has enfolded us in her arms, happy once again to have inhabitants to shelter. She is commodious, which is defined as "adapted to its use or purpose, or to wants and necessities; serviceable; spacious and convenient; roomy and comfortable; synonyms: Convenient; suitable; fit; proper; advantageous; serviceable; useful; spacious; comfortable. Agnes.

She is a craftsman bungalow, a style of architecture popular in America in the early 20th century but originating in Ceylon and India. They are typified by wide eaves, one-and-a-half stories, with a commodious porch having sturdy square or tapered pillars. Inside the rooms connect to each other without hallways, utilizing space more efficiently than earlier styles.

East Nashville is a treasure trove of craftsman bungalows, dozens of square blocks of them, all different, handsome or adorable or ugly as the case may be. Some are falling down, others done up to the nines. At some point in the 1950s in a fit of misguided urban renewal, hundreds of them were pulled down and little brick triplexes and duplexes were plunked down here and there throughout East Nashville. We have a triplex next door and two across the street. In a way it was deplorable, but it's part of what makes EV seem so real. Nothing is too perfect, there is a fairly consistent level of grit and poverty, which I like. The main drag, Gallatin Avenue, is like going back to the 1950s, with wig shops, pawn shops, dusty carpet shops, bunker-type convenience stores with bars on the windows and loud proclamations of Discount Tobacco and Liquor.

We live in Lockeland Springs or the Historic East End, which has been gradually gentrifying over the past few decades, with still a lot of way to go.

East Nashville embodies the anti-globalization No Logo ethos. There are no Olive Gardens, no Fridays around uber-hip Five Points. Instead, the best restaurants favor wood floors and artisan breads. Some don't even have signs, you just have to know about them. They are the ones I've only heard about so far and have no idea how to find. Or they move about, like the Mas Tacos Por Favor bus. Or stay put in a kind of mobile way, like the destination hot dog stand, I Dream of Weenie. The best fish sandwich can be found at King Fish on Gallatin Road, touted as the "crunkest fish in Nashville."

Lest this seem to be all about food, there are fascinating feuds about stolen dog poop clean-up business, long, weepy listserv conversations about stolen lawnmowers, lost pets, and endless discussions about the relative de-merits of the local Kroger (oops, back to food).

So I'm back in the Istanbul of the South (re: when I first moved here in 1989, the mayor had recently told the visiting Turkish ambassador that he'd always wanted to go to Turkey to see the original of Nashville's famous replica of the Parthenon).

And we are happily settling in. My bird feeders have been discovered. I am writing again, most days, at a good clip.

It's dark and dreary now, but the boy-boy has returned for the hols, we are all together again, human and canines alike, and all's right with the world.

New Cover, May Be a Star

2008-11-13T19:02:00.003-05:00

So Mr. Touchdown has a new cover. I like it. It tells a strong story just in that fabulous, tough, courageous face.
Strange though that I have no idea now whether Mr. Touchdown is or isn't a Star book. It says Star on the back cover, it has a new ISBN (both hard and soft cover editions). But is it now returnable? Does it come with industry standard discounts? I'm afraid to ask for fear they'll realize they made a terrible mistake and take it all away again.

The Eagle Has Landed

2008-11-03T14:01:00.004-05:00

I have finally moved into the new phase of my life, which has been in process for a year and seven months. Everything is now in our new house in ultra-hip East Nashville. A mountain of boxes is in the back yard, with more inside awaiting unpacking, which may take years. We've ordered 24 bamboo plants to screen our windows from our next door neighbors. We got wicker chairs for the front porch. We found the dog park.

After a week and two days, I finally am back connected with the outside world--Internet, cable TV, and a land-line phone. I started working at my new gig for BNA. But I haven't started writing yet. I agreed with my writing partner Kate that it was totally useless until after the election. She said everyone in DC is "mad with anxiety." I'd say that sums up my emotions.

Leaving DC was really wrenching. I only made it a little past Roanoke on Friday night. First it took an hour to get to the Beltway from Crystal City. Another hour to get to Front Royal. Then about dark it started pouring rain. At Wytheville, what with rain, traffic, and Cid jumping back and forth from the back to the passenger seat, I figured I'd best call it quits for the night.

Then on Saturday, I suddenly looked around in SW VA or NE TN and realized my little Matrix with the Obama sticker was surrounded by Ford F250 pickups with confederate flags and gun racks, literally. I had a nasty Easy Rider moment. However, my friend Ginny sent me this: I saw a photo of some house down South. Confederate flag flying on a pole, right beneath Old Glory. And an OBAMA sign in the front yard. Could this election be the end of the Southern Strategy?

So here I am, passed through the bardo, through the door at the other end of the hallway. I love my house, named Agnes. The dogs are sleeping off the nightmare. I can watch the Redskins on MNF tonight. I can do errands in half an hour that would have taken me two days in Maryland. I am back with my person.

If Obama wins tomorrow, all will be right with the world. And I believe he will.

My Little Pony

2008-10-03T13:31:00.004-05:00

I have a guest blog today on my friend Josie Sullivan's blog about creative blocks and how I came to draw this little horse.

Josie is a very talented artist, living in Columbia, Missouri.

Twitchy v. Cool

2008-09-27T08:15:00.003-05:00

So I am an INFP on the Myers-Briggs personality scale. I absorb and process information intuitively and am always trying to resolve conflicts between people, except for the times when I blow up and create conflicts (that's another story). But I have a really hard time watching political debates because they are confrontational and it makes me very uncomfortable. Also because I am always afraid of something dreadful happening with the person I support. I made it through an hour and fifteen minutes of the debate last night and then couldn't stand it anymore, not from disgust, but just the stress.

But while I wished Obama could have blasted it out of the park, connect big time, definitively win the debate, he remained his cool, calm, relaxed and thoughtful self. He's just not going to go there with the from-the-gut emotion, a la Bill.

But the reason I had to turn it off was McCain. Now there's an angry, twitchy man. He grimaced, bobbed on his feet, gritted his teeth, turned his back on Obama, refused to look at him, jerked his arms. Then when he got the most pissed off, he lowered his voice to a menacing whine and droned on and on and on. I went into the kitchen at one point and listened to him without seeing him and it was literally scary to hear the tone of his voice. It's all on one emotional note--jaw-clenched anger.

This fury and impatience has no place in the White House. He's shown himself over and over these past few months as prone to sudden, irrational decision-making (ahem-Palin-ahem). Flying in and roiling up the financial bailout is another example. If he hates, say, Putin, as much as he hates Obama, will he treat him the same way?

Give me the guy who's comfortable in his own skin. Who's thoughtful, who doesn't get mad, stay mad. I don't want anyone in that house who's going to make things more dangerous than they are already.

And here's a nice analysis of the post-debate polls v. the pundit-nation's general assessment that it was a draw or a McCain win.

The Souffle Has Fallen

2008-09-26T09:18:00.004-05:00

The financial markets meltdown is oh, so personal for me. At long last I have a contract on my house, and we have a contract on a house in Nashville, but I cannot even begin to exult. I make plans, I hired movers, but I cannot assume this is real or certain. Because even though all the buyers and sellers involved in my own personal little four-car train of sales is solid and are putting up large down payments, I am afraid that one of the banks involved will collapse before we can close. We are all just the kind of low-risk loans banks want. But the bank has to be there to lend us the money.

This is a financial panic, which means there is nothing rational about it. The entire system is over-leveraged. An enormous amout of funny money was created by frothing up the tiniest bit of actual mortgage debt into a vast confection of exotic financial instruments that, believe me, NOBODY understands. Earlier this year I covered the Financial Accounting Standards Board for six months. They are very smart, and very diligent, but even they didn't understand these collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and the rest of the alphabet soup.

This is the most brilliant explanation of how it all happened that I've seen anywhere, although I apologize in advance for the racist example the comedians use to make their point. And I will point out that this first appeared in October 2007!

So the deleveraging process is going on now, and it's as if somebody just slammed the oven door on the global financial system's beautiful souffle.

Wachovia may be next and that's my brokerage. I talked to them months ago and they said we'll probably be OK for 99 percent of the money we have there even if it goes under. But if it goes under, and they told me then it was possible it would and just today its stock has dropped 28 percent, my money could be unavailable for an unknown period of time while it all gets sorted out. That timing could be disastrous for our sale/buy.

And speaking of fallen souffles, can you BELIEVE the complete vacuousness of Sarah Palin's remarks about her foreign policy experience to Katie Couric? I have been trying to refrain from politics on my blog, partly because some of my darling camp friends are of a different persuasion, but I can't help myself. It's all too much. This is what has pushed me over the line. And I admit it's a straw on the giant load of reeking, rotting straw on that poor camel's back. But really! Can anyone take this woman seriously? I love the "Putin rears his head" line. And the "when we send those out" line? Send what out? Spy planes? God help us. It would be hilarious if it weren't so scary. It seriously reminded me of this classic moment from the Miss Teen America contest.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

2008-09-03T09:09:00.009-05:00

When I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Monday night, I really had to stop myself from throwing it at the wall.

I absolutely loved it for more than 400 pages and then the ending was a total, unbelievable mess--a hodge-podge of literary allusions from King Lear to Call of the Wild to Rebecca to The Jungle Book, an utter betrayal of the fabulous characters--human and canine--that he had brought to full, three-dimensional life.

The whole novel is an adaption of Hamlet, so I suppose I should have expected it to be a *ahem* tragedie. Here we go: Edgar's father dies, he suspects his uncle Claude (get it?), sees his father's ghost who confirms he was murdered (get it?), Claude puts the move on Edgar's mother Trudy (get it?), there's a prologue of buying poison (get it?), and Trudy lets Claude move into her bedroom only a few months after the father's death (get it?). I won't even go into the end. Just read the Hamlet plot summary.

But while I was reading it I didn't even bother with making these connections. Had I done so, I would have liked it much less. As it was, I abandoned myself to the narrative, to Edgar, to the dogs.

I have a Shiloh Shepherd, who are very much like Sawtelle dogs. They are bred for size, intelligence, problem-solving, companionship, health, conformation. I trained with a search and rescue team for a year when I got my dog, whose mother and two half brothers were operational on the team. Then I did sheepherding with my dog, who became the top ranked herding Shiloh so far, despite his often neurotic behavior.

So everything about the Sawtelle dogs was utterly fascinating, and accurate, except one strange slip where someone runs their hand lovingly over the dog from croup to withers, which is the wrong way and would stand the dog's hair all on end. He made a couple of other tiny off notes for me, but nothing that bumped me out of the story.

In fact until the last 50 pages or so I loved it as much as Water for Elephants, which was my favorite book of the last few years. Sara Gruen managed to find the perfect logical and satisfying outcome, giving her characters credit for wit and humor and bravery. Literarily, it should have been right down the line of Water for Elephants, wherever you might place that on a literary-commercial spectrum. So he had NO RIGHT to make such a disorganized, untrue to the characters, senseless hash of things at the end.

With Sawtelle, at the end Wroblewski just throws his Hamlet cards in the air and storms out of the novel. The novel isn't "literary" enough for him to get away with such a downer ending, especially one that had every character acting in ridiculous ways. We have the wonderful dog Almondine cast as Ophelia. We have a Polonius character, and Polonius's son plays Lear at the end. Edgar, who "feigns madness" by running away for damned good reasons, returns for no discernable reason from a Stephen King The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon wilderness experience. This is exactly where the novel's internal logic falls apart and the author begins to sweat and mutter to himself as he brutally shoe horns the story and characters into the Hamlet mold.

Edgar Sawtelle is beautifully written, but has sections that are long and pointless, for example, the sequences with the ghost in Henry's barn. If he hadn't mutilated the ending, I would have forgiven everything. I was that much in love. His characterization of dogs is the best I've ever read or imagined. Trudy and Edgar and Gar, Henry, were all living, breathing, real--until the end when they behaved in ways they never would have. In great fiction, the characters are real. You know them, believe in them, love them, hate them. They live. He had all that going and then lost it at the end. Unforgiveable.

In search and rescue we had a truism: Trust your dog. In writing fiction, perhaps the motto should be: trust your characters.

--

20. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
19. A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
18. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
17. The Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
16. The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr
15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

16-20. The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister, The Duke's Children, Can You Forgive Her, Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope,
13-15. LOTR, three volumes.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

The Southern Crescent

2008-08-25T09:43:00.009-05:00

I just returned from New Orleans, having delivered my son to Tulane, which is another story.

We took Amtrak's Crescent, the old Southern Crescent, from D.C.'s Union Station to Union Station in NOLA. After a rather ridiculous scene checking son's giant box of books and tapes at the baggage counter, we boarded and found our cunning Roomette, very cozy (in the real estate sense) but perfectly comfy with a hidden toilet masquerading as a shelf and a fold out sink. An upper hidey hole for luggage. Little bottles of water. I was so excited and happy, especially having gotten the stuff onto the train and being able to stop worrying about it for 27 or so hours.

We were delayed about an hour waiting for an engine to come from Chicago (?). Why we knew not and our keeper O.C., could not tell us, not that we really asked.

Finally we started and went under the Capitol and then out in the pink and gold sunset across the Potomac with a beautiful view of the Jefferson and Washington monuments. Son (who has been immersed in early 19th century U.S. history and the John Adams HBO series) pointed out how pissed Adams would be if he could see that Washington and Jefferson had their glorious piles of white stone but he has -- nothing.

We got to Alexandria about the time we staggered down the hall to the dining car and then stopped again for quite a while. However, we cared not! We were put at a table with a gay man from New York and an Aussie from Hattiesberg, MS, who were perfectly delightful. We talked about traveling, plays, food, college. The Aussie paid for my wine, and we went back to find that our little roomette had transformed itself into bunks.

We snuggled down, read and then I went into a wine-soaked slumber, so utterly contented to be lying down, click-click-clicking away the miles instead of gripping a steering wheel for two days. The train screamed constantly, a high lonesome sound, that also reminded me of my big cowardly dog Cid, who trumpets the same way when he leaves the house, to let everyone know I'M COMING!! DON'T MESS WITH ME NOW!

I wafted away to slumberland, ever so happy.

When I woke up we were nearly to Atlanta and called my friend Nancy, who just moved down there. She had left me a voice mail overnight! We had a nice chat, then after we left Atlanta, son and I had a hearty breakfast. When we went back, our roomette was two facing seats again. We settled down to read and/or sleep while the train poked along between Atlanta and Birmingham, going about 30 or 40 mph, alongside quiet back roads, through peoples' back yards, and across ravines overwhelmed by kudzu, through little towns. Apparently north Georgia had a gold rush! The coolest place of all was the totally steampunk Sloss Furnaces, an old pig iron (what is pig iron, anyway), that is now a museum.

We then passed through Anniston, Alabama, where we saw a lone buffalo in a field and a bunch of Sherman tanks aimed at the train. Then finally we got to Birmingham, where O.C. announced that "fresh air, fresh air," was available outside. It did wake me up a bit to go outside, although the air wasn't really fresh, being very hot and humid and smoky from the smokers who'd been going crazy. Actually this one elderly woman had not refrained from smoking that morning in the train, even though she was hooked up to an oxygen tank and still had her nose apparatus on when she was having her smoke in the fresh air of Birmingham.

We picked up speed a bit after Birmingham. Finally crossed into Mississippi and then went to dinner, where we met a lovely girl from Philly and her Dad. She was also going to Tulane and she and son struck up a conversation.

Then at last, we were into the swamps, where egrets posed against the dark grasses, and quite suddenly onto Lake Ponchartrain. We crossed six miles over the lake with no visible support as if the train were sailing right on top of the blue water. In the south a huge pink and gray thunderhead loomed up, flashing with lightning.

And after a poky, exasperating final few minutes through the wastes of Gentilly, past ancient pumping stations, up and down a wilderness of tracks and highway overpasses and underpasses, we arrived at Union Station in New Orleans.

Amtrak Crescent = Highly recommended

A Loong Time Ago

2008-08-13T09:22:00.003-05:00

I was born in 1949, before the publication of either Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Lord of the Flies (1954), both of which were seminal influences of my generation. A discussion on the Blue Board the other day made it clear that the torch of my generation is flickering. When I was in high school and college, we were all Holden Caulfields, too sensitive to bear how "phony" the world was. And we all viscerally understood the Lord of the Flies' depiction of the cruelty of society, its lust to crush the individualist, to feed on our fears, and the irony of the boys being picked up by a naval cruiser.

But now, those two novels, or at least LOTF, should be "retired from the canon." They are old school. My own son didn't like Catcher. I can't remember the word he used, something about Holden's semi-hipster slang that he thought was--damn, see the mind's going. I'll have to ask him.

Now once again, ardent patriotism is the dominant American ethos. And the startling parochialism of our world view pops up constantly, like this morning when CBS's Harry Smith interviewed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who pleaded for the world to notice that the Russians were "cleansing" South Ossetia and Abkhazia of ethnic Georgians and still shelling Gori nearly a day after the "cease-fire" brokered by that Nicholas Sarkozy. And we so despise the French. (BTW: We now know John Edwards is a closet Frenchman.)

(Yet another divigation: If the comments on that CBS link don't scare you, nothing will.)

Anyway, back to my point (NB: the wandering mind of the old lady), Harry Smith practically cut him off in mid-sentence, "thank you, thank you, Mr. President, now from Armaggedon in Georgia, to the important news, the news you've all been waiting for, MICHAEL PHELPS ... the greatest athlete of all time."

Now I like the Olympics as much as anybody (no, that's probably not quite true, but I do love televised sports), but really! This is a big deal. It's the newest move in the old 19th century Great Game. And we can't do squat about it. The Russians undoubtedly would like to reestablish their old imperial borders in the Caucasus and Central Asia. And not have pro-Western democracies (Armenia is another) lining their southern border, not to mention a possible new NATO member north of Turkey.

But as Saakashvili said this morning, Georgia is a faraway country that we know very little about, like Czechoslovakia in 1939. Like Holden, I felt that Harry Smith was gloriously, freakishly phony. Like Ralph, I am afraid there's nowhere to hide from the world's inveterate cruelty and aggression. Like everyone else, I am day to day more concerned about the fact that I can't sell my house and can't figure out how to get all my son's stuff to college in New Orleans.

WTF, remove those two old novels from the high school reading lists. Replace them with The Giver, by Lois Lowry. I didn't like it very much, the point was much blunter and less interesting than in either Catcher or LOTF, but it wasn't written so long ago as to be completely irrelevant. Or maybe just The Gossip Girls. They're quite revelatory.

Reading on Metro

2008-07-28T11:26:00.004-05:00

For years, I couldn't read on the Metro. It made me car sick. Suddenly I find I can and it is an amazing development. I take those novels I want to read and yet find it hard at first to tackle onto the train and suddenly I am nearly missing subway stops. The first I started on the train was Death of the Heart, followed by Voyage of the Narwhal and then The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In each case, I ended up finishing them at home in bed because I became so absorbed I couldn't bear the stop/start nature of reading on the train.

And I am fascinated by what other people on the train (or bus) are reading. This morning on the bus the woman to my left was reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the woman on my right was reading Thr3e. Lots of people in D.C. read non-fiction; a lot of young girls and middle-aged women read sad trash. People read self-help books about finding love. A handsome black man kissed his beautiful wife goodbye yesterday morning and then stood up to let an older woman sit down and leaned against the wall of the car to read his Bible.

By God, they read. They read actual books.

So far in 2008:

18. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
17. The Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
16. The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr
15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

16-17. The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister, Anthony Trollope,
13-15. LOTR, three volumes.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

The drumbeat begins ...

2008-07-17T09:51:00.004-05:00

Of course, it's been drumming all along in my head and heart but I thought I'd start an occasional analysis of the presidential race here on my ickle blog.

Can't do much better than Jib Jab's latest, of course.

But, for anyone as obsessive as I am, here are two must-bookmark sites: Pollster.com and Zogby's electoral map.

Zogby has been very good in recent cycles and his map has Obama with 273 electoral votes right now, and that's not even giving him Michigan or Ohio, where he's currently running ahead.

Also when you look at the Pollster.com date, look especially at the surveys that poll LV (likely voters) rather than RV (registered voters). LV polls are more accurate. For example, if you look at Florida, in the polls that surveyed LVs, Obama is consistently ahead in the last few weeks. Even better are the campaign internal polls, which draw from actual voter lists, but they are rarely made public.

Also I like (especially because I'm a strong D) the national four-way chart. Since that measures the actual match-ups, I think it's more accurate.

Disclosure: I'm not totally talking as an amateur poll-watcher here. I did political polling for six years and worked briefly at one of the top Democratic polling firms.

We don't want your kind here

2008-07-09T10:30:00.004-05:00

It's an article of faith among book lovers, readers and writers that we should at all times and in all places support independent booksellers. I always have. I have gone way out of my way to buy my Harry Potters from indie stores, preferably members of the Association of Booksellers for Children, of which I am a member. When I lived in Nashville and when I go to Memphis, I never go to a chain bookstore. Why should I when the fabulous Davis-Kidd is available for browsing and brunching?

But I have to say, I have had some bad experiences with indies in our nation's capital. My most recent is the third so far with a venerable indie chain here. I'll describe all three because this is illustrative of why the chains are gobbling up the indies without even a large belch. I went into a branch of the indie which shall be nameless, looked around in fiction, saw nothing but new releases. I was looking for The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope. I go to the desk and ask if they have it. Young fresh-faced boy says, "Oh, yeah, I think we have that." He looks on the computer for a while and then says, "Oh, no, we wouldn't have a book like that."

Like what? Old? Long?

"We could order it."

Only a few weeks before I had gone into the same store looking for The Two Towers. Now come on, what bookstore would not stock all three titles of The Lord of the Rings? I didn't even ask that time because I was so annoyed, and desperate because I had apparently packed the middle volume and sent it with the POD to Nashville (we are trying to move). I needed it so bad I knew I'd be going to Borders on my way home from work since I'd struck out at the indie-bendie. What's the point of dissing them for being lame?

And I remembered that a couple of years ago at a different branch of this indie store, I went in (see I always go to the indie first) to get the third volume of Jeanne DuPrau's trilogy that begins with City of Ember. The name of the third volume is Prophet of Yonwood, and I didn't remember the name exactly, but I knew the author. So it's not on the shelf. I ask. A lady looks it up. (I should mention that both she and the young man were faintly condescending, but not as bad as the premiere indie in DC, Politics and Prose, where I have always been treated like a bug if I ask a question.) She allows as how it is not yet released. "Humm. I'm sure it's out," I said. "Oh, no, dear (subtext, you stupid twit)," she says. So I went that same day to Barnes & Noble and picked one up from the stack on the table display outside the children's department.

With all this history, I told the fresh-faced snot never mind. But as I left and stood in the hot sun outside, I thought again of how stressed and threatened independent bookstores are and how much poorer my life would be without them, and I went back and asked him, "How long would it take to order it?" He looked at me, vaguely. "Trollope," I reminded him. Who can expect anyone to remember something that happened, oh, less than a minute ago? "The Prime Minister." With a faint air of annoyance he goes back to the computer. Finally, he looks up. "I don't know. Maybe by the end of the week. Maybe a couple of weeks."

"No thanks."

By the way, I checked and they still didn't have The Two Towers.

In fairness, the Borders on 18th and L that I went to the next day didn't have it either, but they had a pretty good selection of Trollope and I got The Eustace Diamonds instead. Tonight, in fact, I'm heading to the Borders in Silver Spring to see if they have it.

It's really sad. That very week the Post had a story that this indie is closing some of its branches to avoid bankruptcy. I don't want it to go out of business, but if an indie won't provide better customer service than a mega-chain, maybe it should close up and go home.

Some good ones

2008-06-30T08:54:00.003-05:00

Hit a nice vein of gold with two novels written by women in the 1930s: The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, and David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Coriloff Affair, by Irene Nemirovsky, author of Suite Francaise, one of the best books I've read in years. Bowen is a step along the spectrum from Henry James and Edith Wharton, with the fine, acute portrait of a girl's loss of innocence. The tension is devastating, the language composed, the portraits drawn like a painting we saw the other day at the National Gallery: Hide and Seek by James Jacques Joseph Tissot.
The four novels by Irene Nemirovsky are about sad, angry, complex people. She doesn't do heroes, everyone is flawed. She was a little girl in Russia when Tolstoy was writing his last novels, and then of course, she died in Auschwitz despite pleas from the European literary community to save her. In a way, these novels are an epilogue to War and Peace, the stories of Russian emigres to France, both Jewish and White Russian, and the destruction of Tsarist Russia.
Th1rteen R3asons Why, by Jay Asher, is a young-adult novel about a girl who commits suicide but before she does, she makes 13 explanatory, accusatory tapes and sends them to the 13 people who let her down, or pushed her, to her doom. It's a great idea, well-executed by an author I kind of cyber-know from Verla Kay's Blue Board. Jay is one of my heroes because of this post. Now Th1rteen R3asons Why is a NYT bestseller.

15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

13-15. LOTR, for the millionth time. Actually I'm just starting Return of the King.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Hooray for Ducks!!

2008-06-10T10:39:00.004-05:00

Announcing the long-awaited next Ducks book from my oh-so-talented friend and writing partner, Lynne Berry. Duck Dunks is a rollicking story of a group of mischievous ducklings at the beach. Rhyme and rhythm are perfect, and the illustrations by Hiroe Nakata are darling.

This is a must for all toddler summer birthday presents! Buy it. Love it. Read it. And it's so nice you won't even mind reading it six million times.

Reading list so far in 2008:

12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

13-15. LOTR, for the millionth time. Actually I'm just starting Return of the King.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Eight Belles, All's Not Well

2008-05-04T09:16:00.009-05:00

I haven't watched TV since I turned the Kentucky Derby off yesterday in grief and horror.

I'm a little sorry I even read this NY Times editorial, which my friend sent me and with which I completely agree. Here's how it went down for me. Someone looked at our house, which is now for sale, and didn't get out until a few minutes before post time. I had only read about the Derby Friday and decided I didn't want Big Brown to win because his owner sounded so over-the-top, ranting boastful about him. So I picked either Pyro or Gayego.

I didn't pick Eight Belles because of what Hillary Clinton had said on the campaign trail last week about "don't count the filly out." Sometime last week either Joe Scarborough or Willie Geist had joked that they hoped the filly didn't come in second and break down and have to be shot. I may have pushed that a bit further than they actually said but I swear that was essentially the joke. EDITED TO ADD THIS FROM THE TRANSCRIPT: Joe Scarborough says, "Boy how embarrassing if Eight Belles pulls up lame and they have to put her down."

So the race goes off, huge field, nothing untoward happens, and Big Brown goes ahead at the turn, wins convincingly, and I was excited for him. But Eight Belles was a heroic second. She had even started to close on him and then he just surged ahead, not Secretariat in the Belmont, but he was really good. And I swear as he was galloping out after the race I kept worrying, "Is that a misstep?" "Is he lame?" "Is he limping?" I'm not saying this was a premonition. I think everybody who saw Barbaro in the Preakness is haunted by that possibility. And then all of a sudden he looked like he really was going down. He staggered or stumbled or bucked and his jockey, Kent Desormeaux , came off. He clambered back on and then the cameras panned to Eight Belles, a lump of black on the track.

In hindsight, which came only a few minutes later when a vet said what happened, I think Big Brown must have heard her legs break. It would have sounded like a gunshot.

And the first thing I thought of was Ruffian, and the 1975 match race with Foolish Pleasure all those years ago at Belmont Park. I was watching and that time I really did have a premonition of disaster. Because I was living in New York, and out my window I could see this terrible black storm coming in from the west, and I was afraid they wouldn't get the race off before it hit. And then of course, she broke her leg. She was winning and she died.

And the worst thing about yesterday, the reason I had to stop watching, was that the Big Brown people were still hugging, and shouting, and boasting, and celebrating, exulting. I have to believe they hadn't seen the equine ambulances racing out, didn't know the horse that came in second had just been put down.

And I bring a sudden new perspective to this whole sport from working with the horses at Great & Small, where Penny lived. They have adopted many, many racing thoroughbreds, who break down, or don't win, and their owners just abandon them. They come to G&S skin and bones, lame, crazy, unridable, almost unhandleable. And most of them eventually come around, come back to health at least, but are usually worthless--permanently lame and permanently insane. Some have not survived the abuse and neglect. One of my two special charges out there now is Hayroll, a thoroughbred brood mare, who was never raced and perhaps never even ridden. And she has some problem with one of her front legs so she can't even be trained now for riding. She was crazy when I first met her, a complete nut case, but in the few years I've known her she has become an emotive, quiet darling.

So now that I know these horses personally, I don't know how in conscience anyone could race a three-year-old, much less a two-year-old. They're babies. The article linked to above about Ruffian explains how thoroughbreds are now being bred for short, brilliant careers, rather than strength, stamina, and health. This is like the AKC ruining breed after breed going for looks rather than health, intelligence and temperament.

I've loved horse racing my whole life and now I don't think I could watch another race.

I Take It Back

2008-04-29T13:58:00.004-05:00

Rev. Jeremiah Wright had now revealed that he is a joke. He reminds me of Ralph Nader--a pig-headed spoiler parading around in stubborn self-righteousness. But Rev. Wright does so with a dose of vindictive malice that even Nader can't be accused of. Interesting that this is the definition of jeremiad: A literary work or speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom.

Thanks a lot, dude. But of course, what he wants is to bring Obama down. Because he feels dis-respected. Gives me the shivers. Sorry I ever defended him.

Of course, there's this story that a Hillary supporter booked him at the press club.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

2008-04-04T08:18:00.010-05:00

Forty years ago I was a freshman at Northwestern University. Many of my friends called me "Tennessee," because I was from Memphis and had a Southern accent, which was as exotic to their ears as their Midwestern and Eastern accents were to mine. Most of those friends are friends to this day. And I know that none of us will forget that terrible spring of 1968.

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers strike. Growing up in Memphis, the "garbage men" came every week to take away our trash. They made 25 cents an hour. The dogs chased and bit them. I have read that they shook maggots from rotting garbage out of their clothes at night.

Many of the fine residents of Memphis considered the striking workers to be part of the vast communist conspiracy bent on burying America, as Krushchev had promised, emphasized by pounding his shoe on a conference table. Many of the fine white residents of Memphis were either avowed or covert racists. I have of course written about this in my novel Mr. Touchdown. And I've also blogged about the time I was caught up in the March Against Fear and had a face-to-face moment with Stokely Carmichael.

But I've never written about the shame I felt that night when the news about King's assassination hit the television like nothing had since President Kennedy's assassination a mere five years before. I was from Memphis. I was white. The Lorraine Motel was just around the corner from the train station where I boarded the train to Hardy, Ark., and the summer camp I adored and where I spent as much time as I possibly could. I also caught the City of New Orleans at that station and rode down to the Big Easy to stay with my good friend's cousins and had Hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's when I was only fifteen. I knew the neighborhood well.

The assassin was said to have fled in a light-colored Mustang (which is preserved in the National Civil Rights Museum). I knew a guy from high school--crazy, racist--who drove a Mustang. I was shaking with fear that it was him. And one of my dearest friends was African-American. She had already led protests at Northwestern against discrimination. I loved her. I had become radicalized. But I had my roots in the segregated South. My grandfather used the n-word to refer to blacks until the day he died, stubbornly, because he saw nothing wrong with it.

I was shaken with grief and shame and fear. And of course two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. When I became a reporter, I worked in Connecticut and talked to many people who remembered staying up until well after midnight waiting for Bobby Kennedy to arrive for a rally in Waterbury, Conn., a rough mill town. They held candles and waited. And they weren't disappointed. They remembered it twenty years laters with tears in their eyes.

I remember one of the nights when I was falling in love with my husband here in Washington, D.C.. We were at the Hawk and Dove on Pennsylvania Ave., letting our legs touch under the bar. He and another friend of ours from UPI were talking about 1968 and what it would have been like to be an adult that year, and I didn't admit that I had just turned 19 when King was assassinated. I was in college, a conscious person, but I didn't want them to know how old I was. And I fell farther into love with my soon-to-be husband, because despite his tough and snarly personna, he got tears in his eyes talking about King and Kennedy.

I have since done events with Mr. Touchdown at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. It is an extraordinary place, which everyone should visit. I can't go in without crying. It's laden with the pain and triumph of the Civil Rights Movement. It's gritty and real and terrifying.

It honors a time and a man and a movement that changed America--and me--forever, for better.

Frustration

2008-04-03T09:24:00.006-05:00

I am wondering whether to retire my novel Reply All from the Great Game.
Here's the sad submission story. Last spring I thought I'd finished it after several years of work and loads of revisions based on the advice of my crit partners. I sent it to one very good agent on the recommendation of one of his clients. He took a couple of months to read it. Both before and after his thoughtful and helpful rejection I submitted it to a total of 22 agents. Of those I got 17 rejections or failure to responds, two requests for partials--which turned into rejections--and two requests for fulls (one still out).
Then I had a revelation about the novel and did a complete revision, changing the gender of the protagonists and trying to beef up the present-day through-line, on the first agent's recommendation.
Since that revision, I've sent it out to another 23 agents. I've gotten two requests for partials out of that bunch-one of those turned into a form rejection. The other is still outstanding although I've status queried twice and haven't heard anything so I'm assuming it's a pass. 15 booted it with form rejections. So I have six queries still floating out there.
Is this enough rejection to retire my baby? Should I just wait for the decision of the agent who has the full and then stack Reply All in cybernetic bottom drawer with all the rest of my unwanted children?
Miss Snark said to send a MS to 100 agents before giving up. Stephen Fraser advises (and I can't find the dad-gummed link to his blog where I read this in just the past week or so) taking a MS back for more work if the form rejection percentage tops 90 percent for two rounds of 10 queries each. Mine's about what--math's not my strong suit--77 percent impersonal rejections from round I. And 88 percent on what I thought was a new and improved version.
I love this novel. A friend just called the other night and said she wept through the whole last 75 pages. The crit partner/friend who recommended the agent who read and rejected it so loves one of the two main characters. It just may be too complex in structure, a cross-generational story that goes back and forth in time, but look at that bloody Monsters of Templeton.
What's a poor writer to do? Where's the Kool Aid?

Rev. Wright is Right

2008-03-19T12:36:00.003-05:00

This (though a mite too long) totally sums up my feelings about the Rev. Wright flap. I was going to blog about it myself.

I've been scratching my head
over the past week, going, "Well, gee, the United States IS run by rich white men." Humm, OK, check. "The foreign policy of
the United States DID lead to the hatred in the Middle East that led to 9/11." Humm, check. "Nobody ever DID call Hillary a
n****r." Hum, check, that's certainly true.

And I in fact enjoy full-throated invective against the "system"
in this country that has systematically repressed women, minorities and the poor. I have no doubt that therefore I would enjoy some
of Rev. Wright's sermons and because I love gospel music and dancing in church I suspect I'd enjoy the entire service.

I guess all this makes me an angry, short, white, middle-aged woman who supports Obama and has since
before Iowa. Very dangerous indeed.

Reading Update

2008-02-17T10:04:00.006-05:00

I have been going to the library instead of buying books, which I should always be doing, especially since we're going to be moving soon. Read Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke, the sequel to Inkheart. I liked this one even better but was annoyed by the muddled "Stay Tuned for the Next Installment" ending. So, where is it, Cornelia?? Huh?
Also Heart-Shaped Box, a debut horror novel by Joe Hill. A ripping yarn, couldn't put it down, liked the characters. It had some uneven moments, but really good.
Then I broke down and bought two books. Just finished The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff.
This novel disturbed me on several levels, most of them to do with me and my own writing. It has a number of similar themes to Reply All--a young woman who suddenly finds out a truth about her parentage, a hint of incest, a search for her real father, a daughter repeating the mistakes of her mother. However, dare I say it, I prefer my own Reply All, although apparently no one actually in the publishing business does.
Lauren Groff is a literary novelist, has an MFA, and has published in literary magazines. Her style is lovely, and her story is an interwoven historical mystery, contemporary chick lit-ish story, and tribute to the history of Groff's home town, Cooperstown, NY. But for me these elements were woven together in an arbitrary and disconcerting way, especially the frame of magical realism with the discovery of a kind of Loch Ness monster in the town's lake. Oh, and there's a ghost too, and a Carrie-like fire starter. Oh, and the ghost leads the main character to the last piece of the historical mystery in a ridiculous scene, where I could almost hear the author thinking, Jeeze, where else can I send her to find clues??
I didn't like the main character, especially her sexuality. It didn't seem real. It felt so glasslike, cold, brittle. And some of the historical sections dragged and others were simply confusing. And I guessed who the father was the very first time he was mentioned.
By contrast, I think Reply All is at least a coherent narrative, although like Monsters I jump back and forth in time, but between two main protagonists, the mother and daughter. It's also funnier. There's not much real humor in Monsters, the main character sort of thinks she's funny, but she's so shallow it's just annoying.
Okay, this is harsh. I'm just jealous. Blah, blah. I read it all didn't I? Enjoyed it enough to keep reading. Liked the monster of course. Admired her writing.
Moving on now to Kate DiCamillo's Tale of Despereaux. Library again.

EDITED TO ADD: The New York Times agrees and also writes reviews better than I do.

SO 2008:

5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

It Is Imperative ...

2008-02-01T10:37:00.000-05:00

That we nominate (and then elect) Barack Obama. After last night’s debate, I am even more convinced of this than I was before. Hillary is smart, focused, competent and utterly locked in process. This is her fatal flaw. Last night she used the phrase, “It is imperative,” eight times (cool transcript analyzer tool on the NYTimes Web site) although it seemed like she said it over and over like a parrot. And I recalled a conference of payroll managers that I covered a year or so ago when one of the speakers, a woman, said over and over again, “It is imperative.” That’s Hillary to the bone. An Omega girl, the one who takes care of everything, runs every committee, bosses everyone around, knows everything, and you may like her, even love her when she’s not being annoying, but ultimately I’ve never liked being controlled and managed, even for my own good, much less when I don’t even agree with the management’s direction.

Obama can see the forest. He’s the visionary thinker, the transcendent politician, the way forward, the way out for us, out of this maze of horrible things the Bush administration has dumped us into. Some of my friends, and some pundits, even The New York Times, say Obama will be “eaten alive” by the Washington establishment and that Hillary deserves to be president because of her pragmatism and “powerful intellect.”
I can sense their fear of change and understand their belief that Hillary can handle that meat-grinding machine in D.C. But she’s part of that grinding, complacent, cut-throat, cynical, condescending establishment. Obama isn’t. He’s a breath of fresh air. So what if he runs up against opposition, entrenched special interests? What? We should choose the very thing that’s wrong with our political system?
O-Bam-A

Yeah, no

2008-01-26T11:13:00.000-05:00

So now I'm reading several things, can't get swept away. Right now I'm sleeping with A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie, and The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien. The latter two are wonderful, wonderful, but so intense I can't read them in blissful abandon.

Did devour like Cheetos two books last weekend, one a night. Summer People by Brian Groh, and Riding Lessons, by Sara Gruen. But they weren't great books. Why I wonder? Summer People I had great hopes for since it's about a guy who goes to take care of an old lady at her summer place in Maine. I thought it would take me back to my days in Maine among wealthy summer people. But the main character was annoying and the old lady he takes care of was totally undeveloped. So it was episodic, occasionally somewhat entertaining, and unsatisfying. But one amazing thing, he has his characters say, "Yeah, no,...blah blah," a lot and I realize that everyone does indeed say this. Everybody, my new supervisor, Mica Brezinksy, people on the train. Wow! A revelation indeed.

And damn, I was SO disappointed by Riding Lessons. Water for Elephants is one of my all-time favorite books and I can't believe Sara Gruen leaped from Riding Lessons to Elephants in one jump. That's certainly heartening for all of us struggling novelists. Part of the problem with RL was the pedestrian plot. Part was using first person present tense, which was often clunky and snapped you out of the narrative. But the main problem was the main character who never gelled for me. First she's a World Cup eventer. OK, I love this. I'm a horse person and once judged a crosscountry jump at a 3-day event. Then she's hurt and when we see her next she's a high-powered IT person. Then turns out before going back to work she was an obsessive suburban housewife creating the perfect home. Then she goes home to her parents' horse place in Vermont and she's a bad, angry daughter and mother, and a business slob, and then a ditzy broad who dresses up and tries to cook something fancy and burns her beau's kitchen down, ... damn, what next? Who the fuck is she? My head's all spinning. Mary Stewart knew how to do this kind of story.

Anyway, maybe I'll reread Water for Elephants.

SO 2008:

2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Literacy Abides

2008-01-16T08:57:00.000-05:00

Just re-read a late-1940s sci-fi classic, Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. It's a precursor of The Stand and I Am Legend and I think the first sci-novel to postulate the virtual elimination of the human race by disease. I read it a long time ago and only remember the first part, up to the point where the main character Isherwood Williams meets another survivor he wants to hook up with. I loved when I read it the first time though it's not very good, really. But this time, I still loved the first part where Ish drives across the country from the Bay Area to New York and sees how already in the first months the structures, physical and social, that man has built are deteriorating.

But the second two-thirds of the novel I really found annoying. Ish and his mate, Em, and the few others they find and bond with are so utterly passive and stupid. Within a generation, Ish gives up on teaching the children reading and mathematics because they aren't particularly interested. And instead to get a jump start on the reversion to savagry builds a bow and arrow from scratch. Okay, the bow and arrow is a good idea but come on, reading? Couldn't even read those kids Duck Skates by Lynne Berry? Or Goodnight Moon? Apparently reading to kids hadn't occurred to him.

And I started thinking of all the fun you could have with this. If it were me, I'd go and make my home in a beautiful university campus somewhere far enough South to avoid the worst of the snows and far enough north to avoid the malaria and alligators. Like Duke maybe, though I've never even been on the Duke campus. Or UVA?

And in Earth Abides they are so lazy they won't even haul a gas-powered refrigerator up their hill. I don't believe that. Think of how hard what's her name in Cold Mountain worked when she was left alone in the wilderness to keep her farm going. People just aren't that lazy. If my sister-in-law Carla survived the plague she'd have the whole East Coast's power back on in a few months.

I just looked it up on Amazon and damned if Del Ray hasn't reissued it (2006) and it's 7,000 something on the sales ranking. Whoa!

Also started Tree of Smoke but know I won't finish it. It's too intense. I already dread reading each new chapter because I'm afraid of what's going to happen and don't really want it in my mind. Brilliant, of course. The writing is just what great writing should be. Crisp, invisible, inevitable and occasionally piercing.

So I have only re-read books so far for 2008:

Re-read:

1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson

Welcome 2008

2008-01-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

On New Year's Day my friend Ginny sent me this from The New York Times, about visiting horses at midnight on New Year's Eve. For both of us, it struck a deep chord, especially the line "I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being."

That is so beautiful and so true. It gives me another thread in understanding why I am so contented when I'm with horses. I am still going out to volunteer at the barn where my beloved horse spent his last few years. I brush horses, especially Penrod's girlfriend Hayroll, who the program director describes as "emotive." She closes her eyes in bliss when you brush her and leans her head into your hand for scratchings. Occasionally I tack them up and lead one around the ring with a little child on its back.

And since Penrod died on Oct. 13, twice they've let me ride--each time a big, round-bellied pony, one named Fritz and the other Annelise. It makes me so happy. And though right now I'm tearing up about Penrod, when I'm out there, I don't actively miss him. And maybe in that I'm becoming more like the animals.

I was still awake at midnight this New Year's Eve. I opened the windows and let 2008 in, looked at the Big Dipper from one window and Orion from the other, saw a few fireworks, and like the human I am, wished that this will be a wonderful year.

My three best friends and I have decided that the watch words for 2008 are Focus, Slower, and Deeper. A deeper, slower, more focused life is within my grasp if I have the courage to reach for it. Maybe the fourth word should be courage.

A Year of Reading Not Too Dangerously

2007-12-19T09:26:00.001-05:00

Reading The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud. It's very readable and yet, yet, I'm not sure I like it. It's so ... precious somehow. And I'm troubled because Jeff said the characters reminded him of me and my friends. We did all live in New York and sort of stumble around until we were well into our 30s (some would say we still are still stumbling around in many ways, of course). But these characters irritate me. Except for Bootie. I'm really liking him and rooting for him. Murray and Ludo are repulsive. It reminds me of Wonder Boys. Not a bad thing, obviously. But I personally didn't like that one either. These brainiac, calculating, mannered characters don't touch my heart. But I'm reading and enjoying reading it, so what do I know. I have hopes for Bootie.

So here's an update of the 2007 list of read-for-the-first time books (looks like I'll finish the year with 51 or so read or re-read):

29. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
28. Mirror, Mirror, Gregory Maguire
27. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
26. The Dark River, John Twelve Hawks
25. Lottery, Patricia Wood
20-24. Wit'ch Fire, Wit'ch Storm, Wit'ch War, Wit'ch Gate, James Clemens
19. Golden, Jennifer Lynn Barnes
18. Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr
17. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
16. The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
15. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion
14. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
13. Prep: A Novel, Curtis Sittenfeld
12. The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain that Killed My Father, John Harlin III
11. Songs of the Humpbacked Whale, Jodi Picoult
10. So Not the Drama, Paula Chase
9. The Fugitive Wife, Peter C. Brown
8. The Sea, John Banville
7. Looking for Alaska, John Green
6. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
5. The Night Journal, Elizabeth Crook
4. The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
3. Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause
2. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
1. The End, Lemony Snickett

Re-Read 2007:
21-32: The Royal Book of OZ, Kabumpo in OZ, The Cowardly Lion of OZ, Grampa in OZ, The Lost King in OZ, The Hungry Tiger of OZ, The Gnome King of OZ, The Giant Horse of OZ, Jack Pumpkinhead of OZ, The Yellow Knight of OZ, Pirates in Oz (Ruth Plumly Thompson).
7-20: Wizard of OZ, The Marvelous Land of OZ, Ozma of OZ, Dorothy and the Wizard of OZ, The Road to OZ, The Emerald City of OZ, The Patchwork Girl of OZ, Tik-Tok of OZ, The Scarecrow of OZ, Rinkitink in OZ, The Lost Princess of OZ, The Tin Woodman of OZ, The Magic of OZ, Glinda of OZ (L. Frank Baum)
1-6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince.

Daemon

2007-12-08T10:15:00.001-05:00

50,025!

2007-11-30T10:48:00.000-05:00

Well, it turned out not to be interminable after all. It may suck, but it's finished and in a while I hope that icon over there reflects that I am a dad-gummed winner.

45,000!

2007-11-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to crank it up, I must say. It's getting easier somehow, even though in places I'm saying stuff like and then they all talked it over and decided what to do and then they did it. A new character leaped into the fray and now we're racing to the end. I actually may not finish the story before I reach 50K. Man, it feels good to be writing so quickly and happily again.

40000!

2007-11-25T20:33:00.001-05:00

This is a slog. I just wrote a thousand-word information dump, which is of course toward the end of the novel and should be artfully interwoven into a riveting narrative much earlier. Whatever. The words are there. And I actually think I need to have a bit more of this historical sweep before I move on, so I know what the hell I'm talking about. But at this point, I think I may be able to do 2000 words a day and make it to the finish line. Interesting. I'm tired though. Very tired of this awful novel. I wonder if it has any redeeming value at all. But it's so close to being done that I will finish it. And this is as bad a blog post as Interminable is a novel.
Excelsior!

30,000!

2007-11-19T09:04:00.000-05:00

I keep plugging away. I am already only 1000 words short of where I ended last year. I am glad Nano had Neil Gaiman's pep talk yesterday or whenever it was. About hating your novel. I pretty much hate it right now. But as he advised, you just keeping adding words. I will keep adding words. And right now the end seems WAY too close. I wonder if I can add another 20,000 crappy words to this crappy novel.
Onward.

25,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-11-16T09:43:00.000-05:00

Last night I sprinted and wrote 3,752 words to reach the magical, mythical midway point. The last scene I wrote I like. It was scary in the Alfred Hitchcock "suspense is waiting" sense.
And the very strange think is that focusing so hard on Interminable somehow unblocked a bit of my brain and this morning I woke up with a much clearer sense of where I need to go with this (hopefully) last edit of my novel Reply All. It's like peripheral vision. At night, I can see my black dog Lucky in the dark backyard only when I don't look directly at him. We used to use this at camp, too. If we were sneaking down the hill at midnight to "pull capers" in camp parlance, we'd look away down the hill so we could see if the counselors were standing by their cabin in the shadows waiting to catch us.

20,000!

2007-11-14T09:33:00.000-05:00

Broke the 20,000 mark last night. I'm a bit behind and will have to hustle to reach the mid-point (25,000) by tomorrow. Possibly do-able.
I finally got them into some action again and that goes a lot faster.
This is actually easier than it may sound. The whole trick is sitting down. Once I start to write I can write pretty fast. But the first hour or so is a matter of a paragraph, check my word count, another paragraph, check the word count, futz around with the Excel spreadsheet. Check my e-mail. Writer a paragraph, check ... well, you get it.
Finally though at about the 500 word point, things seem to break open. If I had more discipline I could write thousands of words, but I tend to (ahem) pace myself. But too, there's a bit of a reason for that. I deplete and need a night to recharge and let my subconscious work on the story, so I have something halfway interesting to write the next day.

10,000+ and counting

2007-11-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

Well, my YA fantasy novel that I've dubbed Interminable is coming along nicely. I broke the critical 10,000 mark last night. Right on schedule, no more, but (hoo-ah) no less.

And I sneaked out a scene last night that actually made me cry. Dogs, of course.

I kind of like Interminable, but it's typical of my stuff. It doesn't perfectly fit in any real category and thus as usual will probably be totally unpublishable. But at least it's only in one character's POV and is chronological. And has a plot, albeit a bit meandering at this point, and lots of action. Mass executions. Dire beasts, etc.

This next 10,000 words will probably be hell, especially because right now I intend to slow down the pace a little and build in a bit of history and community formation. Give my heroine a little rest, although the anxiety and danger doesn't really abate. It's a breather. But may make me have to push a little harder to keep up the word count.

Here's a definition of interminable that I find quite apt,
endless: tiresomely long; seemingly without end

Can't wait for Vol. II Incomprehensible, and III Inconceivable

Word 5190

2007-11-04T09:22:00.001-05:00

It's getting more painful the longer I push. I've written 60 words this morning. I've also done the dishes, paid my bills online, checked all my e-mails, washed the dog's dishes, am gazing longing out the window at the leaf blower (the county starts its first annual leaf-sucking rounds in our neighborhood tomorrow). I'm looking at my scrawled outline and can't read some of it. It sucks anyway. This is what writing is like. The fun part is staring out the window imagining it. The hellish part is sitting down and trying to squeeze it out onto the computer screen.
And I'm only 9 percent ahead of where I was last year on day four and I feel like I've been tremendously more productive and disciplined.

Nano '07

2007-11-01T13:47:00.000-05:00

Started today on a brand new novel--a young-adult fantasy. Feels quite strange to be back in YA after a couple of years on two adult novels, one of which is in its seventh draft, and the other just beginning a third. I may cheat and work a little on the second adult novel but for the most part this year's Nano experience will be by the books--one month, one first draft of a brand new novel.
I am in Excel spreadsheet heaven.
Of course my friend Teacakegirl is already so far ahead I can't even see her dust. She's always like this.

Sales Schmales

2007-10-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

Check this out re: sales of finalists and winners of the Man Booker Prize( from Publishers Lunch:

"Enright's book ranked fifth in sales prior to the award among books on the shortlist, having sold approximately 3,000 copies, ahead of Indra Sinha's Animal's People. (Even though bettors favored Lloyd Jones's MISTER PIP, Bookscan figures cited in the press showed sales of just over 5,000 copies for that book.) Random UK says they are rushing a reprint of 50,000 copies of THE GATHERING."

This is really frightening that the award-winning novels sell so few copies before they actually win the awards. No wonder literary fiction is such a hard sell and why a writer has to build up a reputation in the literary magazines or elsewhere before they can publish. I have a cyber-penpal writer friend, Timothy Schaffert, whose wonderful novel The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, was published by a feisty imprint of a major publishing house, favorably reviewed in The New York Times, sold well but apparently not well enough. His next two novels have been published by Unbridled Books, headed by the editor who formerly edited Timothy at BlueHen.

This is a rough, unlovely business. And writers don't like thinking about that side of it. We'd rather just write what's in our heads and hearts, but it creeps in all the time. Will this sell? Will anyone publish this? Will anyone read this? Maybe I should throw in some sex, murder and general mayhem to make it more marketable.

And those sales figures are so low that many self-published novelists I know are selling that many. Some are selling more.

OZ

2007-10-03T07:40:00.000-05:00

I am re-reading the OZ books--in order. I don't think I have ever pulled this off because I usually skip The Wizard of OZ. Partly because it's one of my least favorite OZ books and it's not illustrated by John R. Neill, which makes it weird for me.
I was raised on the OZ books, as was my mother before me. In fact most of the OZ books we had when I was a little girl were my mother's. My grandmother would read her children one chapter a night and was deaf to their entreaties for "just one more chapter."
By the time my brother and I got through with them, most of our OZ books had lost their covers and the first few and last few pages, so that my mother had to just tell us the beginning and end of the stories, which she had pretty much memorized.
I have a vivid memory of lying in bed with my brother and my mother when she was reading us The Land of OZ. I was still a little too young for it and was both fascinated by and scared of the cover, which had a castle in the night with stars in the black sky.
To be honest, I was the one who trashed the books. Indulgent in some ways, our mother actually let us COLOR the pictures in the books. Thinking of this now gives me hives. At least they weren't first editions. My brother was always careful, neat, chose pleasing colors and stayed in the lines. I was ridiculous. Basically just scribbled until the illustrations were hidden under thick layers of red or black waxy crayon.
But all my life in sickness, sorrow, depression, exhaustion, loneliness, I have turned to OZ and other "baby books" from my childhood for comfort. It's why I finally realized I should write children's books until I worked some unfinished business out of my innards. I am grateful to Books of Wonder for reissuing the OZ books in facsimile of the original first editions. They are glorious. My favorites were actually the ones Ruth Plumley Thompson wrote after Baum died. But right this minute I'm reading The Lost Princess of OZ, my favorite of the Baum OZ books. I have a pleasant fall to look forward to.

Re-Read 2007:
7-17: Wizard of OZ, The Marvelous Land of OZ, Ozma of OZ, Dorothy and the Wizard of OZ, The Road to OZ, The Emerald City of OZ, The Patchwork Girl of OZ, Tik-Tok of OZ, The Scarecrow of OZ, Rinkitink in OZ, The Lost Princess of OZ
1-6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince.

Here's an update of the 2007 list of read-for-the-first time books:

26. The Dark River, John Twelve Hawks, sequel to The Traveler. Did not inhale this one as I did the other, but toward the end decided it was pretty good.
25. Lottery, Forrest Gump wins the lottery.
20-24. Wit'ch Fire, Wit'ch Storm, Wit'ch War, Wit'ch Gate, James Clemens
19. Golden, Jennifer Lynn Barnes
18. Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr
17. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
16. The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
15. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion
14. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
13. Prep: A Novel, Curtis Sittenfeld
12. The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain that Killed My Father, John Harlin III
11. Songs of the Humpbacked Whale, Jodi Piccoult
10. So Not the Drama, Paula Chase
9. The Fugitive Wife, Peter C. Brown
8. The Sea, John Banville
7. Looking for Alaska, John Green
6. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
5. The Night Journal, Elizabeth Crook
4. The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
3. Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause
2. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
1. The End, Lemony Snickett

Writing is Rewriting

2007-09-16T08:42:00.000-05:00

I have been hard at work on a complete revision of my novel Reply All. It started when I got a thoughtful and constructive rejection from a really great agent whose main issue was that he didn't know where the book would go on a bookstore's shelves. He also had some problems with the basic structure of the novel, which is a cross-generational story about how a mother's adolescent freakout led to the child's problems and adventures and self-realizations.

The revelation I had, while driving my two dogs up to Little Bennett Regional park here in Maryland, was that the other main character should be female rather than male. When I realized this, I actually felt my heart twist in my chest and I teared up. It was the exact right thing. Not only was it the way out of the box the agent had pointed out--the problem of audience. It was the exact right thing for the novel itself.

The main character is a Nashville session musician, a dobro player. How much hotter is a chick dobro player? The main character after learning the mother's secrets, goes in search of the three men who could be the father. How much more nuanced is that quest when it's a girl rather than a guy? As my friend Susan put it, there's the "bat squeak" of sexuality between a father and daughter. A road trip for a girl even now is more edgy than for a guy. Hanging in bars is edgier for a chick. Talking football is cooler for a girl. Everything is better, including releasing something in me to probe mother-daughter relationships, father-daughter relationships. And the sibling dynamic is much more interesting now that it's three sisters rather than two sisters and a brother.

AND the change puts the novel firmly in the category of women's fiction with a whiff of chick lit. Young women will read about their mothers' lovers. Older women will read about their daughters' search for themselves. Women will read family sagas. Guys -- not so much.

Again, to quote Susan, it's the beneficial influence of form following function rather than entrapment. In other words, changing the novel to appeal to its true audience is not a sell-out; it's taking the story to a higher level.

All this said, don't think I've abandoned Robert for Vivi without a pang. I always thought Faulkner was talking about bits of writing you like very very much when he said writers must be strong enough to "slay their darlings." I never thought of actually killing off your darling characters. I've slain characters before without much of a pang, but Robert is different. I love him. And he now goes into a strange half-life, literary limbo, because he'll always BE there. He just doesn't go on with this novel. It's very sad.

Who reads?

2007-08-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

Not many of us and not much, and that's not great news for us writers. But after all, we writers can't help it, even if no one reads us. And we readers can't stop either.

from Publishers Lunch today:
"An AP-Ipsos poll about reading habits has spawned an assortment of news stories. In one angle, among those who read books last year, seven was the average number of books read. But 25 percent of adults surveyed said they didn't read any books last year. (It's not clear if the poll was limited to literate adults or not--an important factor since we only have a 70 to 75 percent literacy rate to begin with.)

The Guardian notes, "of those who did read, women and retirees were the most avid readers, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices. The median figure for books read - with half reading more, half fewer - was nine books for women and five for men.... People from the West and Midwest are more likely to have read at least one book in the past year. Southerners who do read, however, tend to read more books - mostly religious books and romance novels - than people from other regions."

One in five people read romance novels, and women read more of every category of book than men except for history and biography. The survey also found that fewer liberals and moderates are non-readers (22 percent) than conservatives (34 percent)."

Which prompts me to reup my list for the year:

20-24. Wit'ch Fire, Wit'ch Storm, Wit'ch War, Wit'ch Gate, James Clemens
19. Golden, Jennifer Lynn Barnes
18. Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr
17. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
16. The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
15. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion
14. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
13. Prep: A Novel, Curtis Sittenfeld
12. The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain that Killed My Father, John Harlin III
11. Songs of the Humpbacked Whale, Jodi Piccoult
10. So Not the Drama, Paula Chase
9. The Fugitive Wife, Peter C. Brown
8. The Sea, John Banville
7. Looking for Alaska, John Green
6. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
5. The Night Journal, Elizabeth Crook
4. The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
3. Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause
2. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
1. The End, Lemony Snickett

The Angel's in the Details

2007-08-10T08:16:00.000-05:00

I wanted to share one thing from the SCBWI conference in Los Angeles. Walter Dean Myers was the keynote speaker the first day. His voice is like James Earl Jones's and he has a marvelous, easy, natural delivery, and spoke about what distinguishes good writing from the other kind. He read a sentence from a novel he'd once critiqued: "I stormed into the bedroom, paced the hardwood floor and then collapsed on the bed." As he said, this sentence gives the reader some information but it's not good enough.

He said a writer should always be looking for "the detail that explodes the moment."

This exploded my mind. I've been thinking of it ever since. Just yesterday I was thinking of details that could have exploded the sentence above. Did the door crack when she slammed it, did it bounce open again, did the door handle fall off? Did she kick a stuffed animal across the hardwood floor? Were the sheets on the bed rumpled and dirty? Or was the bed covered with a white duvet and 600-thread-count sheets? Did someone's voice roar up from downstairs after her? Or is she a he? Is there a Ruger under the bed? A computer on the desk clicking through possible passwords to hack the bank downtown?

Rococo in LA

2007-08-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

So Gus and I just returned yesterday from six days in the City of Angels. It was an amazing trip, focused on a reading of the romantic comedy my friend Susan Baronoff and I are working on, with real actors. Also the SCBWI annual convention. AND college visits to USC and UCLA for Gus. AND seeing my old friends Barbe and Howard and their darling daughter Zana. So it was busy and fraught. We were working on Rococo almost non-stop right up until the moment the actors started arriving. Literally still collating as they were arriving.

But it was truly thrilling to see other people and really accomplished actors read our work. And it went well! The reading showed up only a few real issues, and none with the actual flow of the dialogue. I just wish we had been able to finish the third act before this reading, but I think we've got a pretty clear idea of what we have to do and where it's going from here.

The two mothers of our lovely sparring clueless-that-they're-falling-in-love couple and Fred, our heroine's friend, have really come to life.

This time I felt much more comfortable in LA, too. Its size began to seem manageable, perhaps because I drove back and forth from the hotel in Century City to Susan's house in Venice so often and because I succeeded in never getting on a single freeway.

USC was very impressive. We had a real tour there and got a better sense of it. UCLA was absolutely gorgeous. We did a self-guided walking tour so didn't get any read on its academics or character. Actually at USC we had the "Lauren Tour," where the theater major tour guide told us all her experiences at various spots on campus. "This was my dorm and I lived with other theater majors. This is the library. I once got really scared way down in the stacks and RAN out." But still, she did manage to impart some facts.

So, we're back to 1000-degree, 100 percent humidity DC. I miss the ocean breeze.

Texas

2007-07-15T09:56:00.000-05:00

I was born in Texas, in San Antonio. We moved to Memphis when I was six. This trip we went back to San Antonio, saw the house where we lived and went downtown to the Alamo and the River Walk. I thought I would remember it, have that emotional kick of memory. Nothing. We saw Joske's, the department store whose jingle I remember perfectly. Nothing. It was like I had never seen it before. Same with the Alamo. I only remembered it as if I'd seen it in pictures. We went through the Villetta, the old city where my brother tells me I always begged to go to the old glassblowers shop. ??? Really? The glassblowers shop just closed last year. It had opened a few years after I was born. Strange, strange. The River Walk was lovely though.
And in Austin, I couldn't get a sense of the city at all either. The coolness doesn't hang in the air. I think I missed trees. I've lived so long in the East that the absence of big trees is oppressive.
But the part of the University of Texas we saw was wonderful. We went to see the dormitory our mother lived in when she was at Texas for one year in the 1930s. Littlefield Hall. Totally enchanting.

New Orleans

2007-07-15T09:44:00.001-05:00

We went to New Orleans on the 2007 Tour of the Southland. The first time I had been back since Katrina. I had been there for a week in June 2001 staying at the Ritz Carlton for a convention where I was on the staff.
Physically where we were this year (the French Quarter and the Garden District) we saw little obvious damage. The Super Dome is rebuilt of course. We saw lots of construction and a couple of burned houses in the Garden District, near Carrollton Ave. Otherwise it was as beautiful and exotic as it has ever been, hinting of so much.

But but but ... the energy has been sucked out. The streets are not as crowded. A sign at Cafe du Monde on Jackson Square says, "Please seat yourself." The last two times I was in New Orleans the lines were blocks long to get a seat. Bourbon Street had people, we saw a crew of tap-dancing kids leaving, there were eccentrics and freaks, but not so many, not so flamboyant. The old black man with a white beard singing "Sitting on a Dock of the Bay" on Jackson Square was really good, but he didn't have much money in his guitar case.

WriterWorking

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