Belly update + house update

Here's my belleh in the final stretch! Before you make any, ahem, comments with words like "huge" or whatever, you may want to refer back to this post. [Smiles.] Still feeling [mostly] great, though I have my first "discomfort" related to pregnancy, which I am diagnosing myself, because, you know, Google qualifies us all to be doctors! I think I have pregnancy-related carpal tunnel. Bizarre. The last week-ish, my hands have been going numb while I sleep; I wake up to numb, painful hands! It sucks. Just one at a time, depending which side I'm sleeping on, so I'd roll over and then wake a short time later with the other hand numb and painful. And even while I'm not sleeping, my right hand is feeling week and less mobile than usual. Anyway, a quick Google search of "numb hands/sleep/pregnancy" turns up a bajillion hits that suggest that pregnancy-related swelling (which I don't have too badly, though my rings have been snug) puts pressure on the median nerve running through the carpal tunnel. Suck! I slept in a wrist brace last night and had no problems.

Speaking of sleeping and last night, we camped out in the living room. The downstairs being (halleluja!) finished but still empty o' furniture, and the upstairs bedroom still needing painting, we brought in the sofa bed and made a little camp in the living room. Leroy loved it, because the sofa bed is much lower to the ground than our bed, and he could snuggle right up alongside it and practically feel like he was in bed with us (Leroy is not a bed dog; not a furniture dog in any way. He's spoiled as heck, but not in that way.)

So, a few floor pictures! Not super-exciting, since the rooms are all empty, but exciting for us:

The living room before with the red walls (which we painted 7 years ago and have loved, but just felt the need for change) and the shockingly unbeautiful fir floors, which had probably never been refinished since they were first installed in 1924:
The living room this morning, post camp-out, with Leroy showing his tolerance (and even enjoyment) of having the bed made over him. The new wall color is Eastern Amber by Behr. Love it.
This is how bad the floor was in places before:
And how lovely after:
Like honey. [Happy sigh.]

And here's the sanding man:

So, that's all to show right now. The bathroom is finished too and I love it so much I just want to stand in it and admire it, but no pics yet. Nursery = almost painted. Bedroom = almost begun. So. Still much to do. Better go get started!

Hope all's well! Cheers. And if there are any emails I haven't responded to, I apologize, but I will! I promise!

why are we doing this?

Goodness gracious. Painting fatigue. Still so much to do. Ai ai ai. Visualizing the final product as I limp-waddle to bed . . .

Good night!

Starred Review!!!

Yippeeee! Great news: Silksinger is getting a *starred review* from Kirkus in the July 15 issue.

Here it is:

Dreamdark: Silksinger. Laini Taylor. Illus. by Jim Di Bartolo. (Putnam 9780399246319)

Thumb-sized mage/warrior Magpie Windwitch’s quest to find and wake the creation-weaving Djinn moves one step closer to completion but also suffers a major reverse in this headlong sequel to Dreamdark: Blackbringer (formerly Fairies of Dreamdark: Blackbringer, 2007). On the trail of the Djinn Azazel, Magpie and her allies wing into the fairy city of Nazneen too late to prevent young Whisper, last of the Silksinger clan, and the sleeping Djinn she guards from falling into the clutches of the deliciously frightening general Ethiag and Ethiag’s mysterious Master. Replete with desperate fights and flights, the plot races along to a rousing climax—and then a stunning betrayal that both renders the fairies’ victory a qualified one at best and leaves the ending open for a direct segue into the next episode. Equally adept at folding in both low humor and elevated imagery and language, Taylor expertly weaves multiple story lines into another ripping yarn, once again taking readers into an uncommonly well-articulated world where the magic follows credible rules and the fairies are anything but the sugarplum sort. (Fantasy. 11-13)

Thank you, Kirkus! I love Kirkus; they also gave Blackbringer a starred review :-)

In "domestic news", Jim is currently putting the third coat of varnish on the wood floors, while Leroy and I are comfortably lounging away from the fumes at my parents' house. He'll get a fourth coat on this afternoon and be done. Yay! Then it's on to the many other projects that are underway:

--Painting the living room. It just had to be done; have to take advantage of the room being empty for the first time in 8 years. I got a really pretty light honey-colored paint to replace the red, which I'm feeling rather done with. With the new floors and lighter walls, that room will be transformed. Can't wait to see it!

--Painting the new nursery; I've primed and spackled and caulked, now it needs to be sanded and painted. The new carpet will go in probably Tuesday. Out of fear of off-gassing and VOCs and all that chemical crap in carpets, we found a lovely wool carpet in the remnant room of a local carpet warehouse for a steal.

--Painting our bedroom. Adjacent to the new nursery, with an open arch door between them; the colors will look lovely together: tangerine for the nursery, a light teal blue for the bedroom.

--Painting the bathroom. That's a light grass green, beautiful.

(What's with all the $^&@*%!!! painting??? Well, we've been in the house 8-1/2 years; you just get bored of stuff after a while, plus it gets dingy. And once you start . . . you just kind of want to keep going. It's going to be fabulous when it's all done. But . . . maybe it's a little psycho to be taking it on just now. Race against the calendar! Ah well, nesting impulse!

--Stair risers! I'm excited about this one. Inspired by decorative painting projects undertaken at Maryam's fabulous house/B&B Peacock Pavilions in Morocco (My Marrakesh, a favorite blog of mine), I got the notion to paint the stair risers. This was the initial inspiration:
Isn't it beautiful? See, this group of decorative painters from the States have now made two trips to Morocco to work on Maryam's house, and the results are spectacular. You can see much more at Maryam's blog here and here, and by navigating around. The designer, Melanie, also has a blog, Design Amour (this link to another stairway they did at Peacock Pavilions), and a business that sells decorative painting stuff, including this Morocco-inspired line of stencils. I've picked out three simple patterns and will alternate stairs, in a limited palette that pulls in the colors of the surrounding rooms. I haven't actually ordered the stencils yet, so this project may be a while in the doing, but it's going to be so cool. Here's another example of some cool decorative risers:
For ease of painting, I'm going to ask the contractor to cut pieces of plywood or whatever he thinks best to the right sizes and paint them before installing. Our stairway is kind of tucked away, so it won't make a big design impact on the house, but will be a nice surprise when you round the corner. So fun!

Suffice it to say, the house is a shambles right now, with the few rooms not undergoing projects currently stuffed with furniture and stuff from the rest of the house. And then there are the various fumes, which accounts for me not being there. Anyway, surely more than anyone cares to know. It'll be so nice to be done with everything and post pictures. You know how awesome it is to chill out in a freshly cleaned house? Well, I'm imagining that when we're finally done, it will be like that times a hundred. Whew. And perhaps just in time to bring Professor home to it :-) We'll tell her the house is always that tidy; she won't know the difference! August 1 draws near . . . wonder when Professor will decide it's time to emerge? Early, late, on time? Who knows? Hopefully not early, though! There's too much work to finish first!

Cheers! Oh, and Leroy says hello :-)

In case you're thinking of spending $40,000 on a kid's bed ...

In the midwife's office the other day I was leafing through a baby magazine and saw an add for cute crib bedding; the company name stuck in my head, and at home I looked it up. Well, the bedding in question cost five times what our crib cost!!! For real! Snort snort, chuckle chuckle. And compared to other stuff on the site, the bedding is a steal. So I guess poshtots.com is for rich people. Really, the name says it all! I've never loved the word "posh." Posh, I am not. It's always fun to browse in the realm of the ridiculous though, so here we go:

Neato dresser!
Only $16,200! I'll take two.
How about a dresser that's been gnawed by a beaver?
$7,200. Beaver not included. (For that price, I want the rodent! How about a beaver trained to make a perfect latte? Really, for $7000 . . . )
Exploding cabinet! $9000!
The very pretty Rosalie three-drawer dresser; by now I find myself thinking, "Wow, this one's only $1726." ha ha!

But frankly, dressers are small potatoes. Let's look at beds, starting with a cheap one:
The lovely "pink Cucciolo Venice bed" is custom-painted with a portrait of your chosen AKC breed of dog. Huh. But that's nothing. Look at this:
Yeah. That's a bed. A $75,000 bed!!! Here's the inside:
Is it just me, or does it seem that a child who sleeps in a bed like this would grow up to be a very unpleasant person? I see ringlet curls and tantrums. I see cruelty to the less fortunate. I see "let them eat cake."

There's another style of coach too, a bit more "Cinderella" and only $47,000, if you're on a budget.


But really, why sleep in a vehicle (kind of low brow, really, like living in a car!), when your bed can be a house?


English Tudor cottage bed, $14,450; Gingerbread cottage, $15,300; Princess palace playhouse bed, $47,000. Yeah.

And those are just beds. Check out the playhouses!!! Oy. Rich people. How much do you suppose it costs Habitat for Humanity to build an entire house in, say, Cameroon or Ecuador? I really have no idea. Less than $47,000?

I love playhouses, though. I dream of one day having a fabulous tree house, not so much for the kids as for me! It would have a deck comfortable enough to sit out on and sip a glass of wine, and perhaps a suspension bridge to an outpost in another tree. Somewhere with a good view from which to watch the Apocalypse through binoculars. ha ha. Or, hey, to watch the Rapture. That will be quite a sight for the earthbound among us!

Well. Needless to say, there is nothing at that rich-person website I will be ordering. The new nursery is inching toward completion though! Yesterday I primed it for painting before Jim had a spell and ordered me out of the paint fumes. Bah. There's so much to do! See, this husband of mine got a last-minute notion to take on the itsy bitsy project of refinishing the wood floors downstairs, so he's buzzing away with various sanders and the house is a shambles. It's going to be awesome, though. I can't WAIT to reassemble everything! With the living room empty, it's very tempting to want to paint it; it's been about 7 years. But if I'm not allowed to paint . . . and we already have the bathroom, bedroom, and nursery to paint. Maybe another room is too much. But . . . it's the perfect time! Sigh. Nesting-overdrive. Can't wait for the actual nesting part.

Pictures as soon as there's something to show!

More on authors responding to negative reviews

Wow. When I wrote yesterday about writers cleverly flouting negative (or mediocre) reviews, I hadn't seen this news item about Alice Hoffman. So, to be clear: THIS is not what I meant! There's nothing clever about calling a reviewer a moron and an idiot on Twitter and then giving out their phone number! Really poor form from a bestselling novelist. Well, perhaps I shouldn't weigh in so strongly. I haven't read the review or the tweets -- Hoffman has since apologized, and she says the review had spoilers in it, which is bad form on the part of the reviewer, so I suppose it's bad all the way around. But the key, I think, is for authors to have grace, and when possible, to have humor. There are ways to make light of a bad review and come off as a swell person, like Brad Metzer did in the video in my last post. And then there are ways to sound like a prima donna buffoon, like Hoffman.

The above-linked salon.com article also gives other [fun] examples of ungracious authorly rebuttals to reviews. I think: best to just suck it up. It seems to me that it's just bad form to argue with a review. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion.

Thoughts? Examples?

*Oh, here's the review in question.

Thoughts on Reviews, and on Advances

I have nothing against book reviewers, or movie reviewers, or any kind of reviewers. I read reviews and I tend to heed reviews. Some reviewers more than others, certainly. For example, I almost never agree with Stephanie Zacharek of salon.com, but I usually find Peter Travers of Rolling Stone to be right in sync with my tastes. Usually. There's the matter of him having liked Dogma, a movie I hated, but hey, that was like ten years ago. So. Reviewers perform an important service and I'm glad they do what they do. But I still find it really funny when a creator, let's say a writer, finds a clever way of flouting bad reviews.

Like this little commercial by Brad Meltzer, who I've never read, but Jim has:
Ha ha ha! Love that! It makes me curious about the book, which is what writers want readers to be.

Another case of a writer cleverly getting back at reviewers who'd said snarky things was the brilliant post by James Kennedy from a few months ago, which I linked to at the time. I was going to post an excerpt here, but the whole thing is just too much fun.

I was talking with some writer friends recently about reviews, and the extent to which we all read reviews of our own books. For my part, I have Google Alerts for my name and the titles of my books, so when something pops up online, I generally find it right away. There's a moment of anxiety before I know if it's a good review or a bad review, and if it's a bad review (which thankfully I haven't gotten too many of), I have a glum moment and then forget all about it. Well, almost all about it. Some among my writer friends, though, don't want to see reviews at all; they don't want that anxiety and just don't sign up for Google Alerts. I can understand that too. Perhaps it's best to focus on the writing at hand, always be moving forward through the new book and then onto the next, rather than dwelling and looking backward.

That's a good policy in general; the writing must always be the priority, and not the reviews and sales figures. I mean, of course we all want great reviews and huge sales, but if a book is performing modestly, one must learn to be okay with that and look ahead, invest one's hopes in future books. There's that great Marge Piercy quote: "Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved." It's so true. Being a writer is mostly solitary work, just you and the words. The "being loved" part makes up a very, very small portion of your life -- though that very small part can feel disproportionately important. I mean, for me, getting awesome emails from readers more than compensates for the many days of isolated, butt-in-chair work. Still, if I was doing it just in hopes of being loved, and not because I love the work, it wouldn't be a very good life. You know?

I was also discussing another matter with my writing friends: the matter of a writer (not among us), who'd been paid an obscenely large advance for a forthcoming YA series. I want to say here, without going into detail, that writers get jealous of other writers for a variety of reasons; it's completely natural and very very difficult not to fall into the green-monster trap at least every once in a while. So-and-so is getting amazing marketing; so-and-so has sold X number of foreign rights; so-and-so has a movie option, and his/her publisher had a special leather-bound copy made of his/her book just out of sheer awesomeness, and presented it as a gift. There's always something going on or rumored to be going on that makes other writers' congratulatory smiles feel a little pasted on -- of course there's genuine happiness for the success of others (unless they're jerks, heh heh) but there's also jealousy, and big advances certainly invoke that.

Well, after that discussion, I mentioned the topic to another writer friend, Stephanie, who sent me this link to John Green's blog, and a similar discussion going on. The comments bring up some good points too.

So, there's a bit of writerly nitty gritty that may or may not be of interest. Cheers!

Oh, the berries

The unambitious to-do list for the weekend included: get more Oregon strawberries while they're still in season. It's a short season, a short very sweet season. Look at these:
They're small:
And they're red as rubies all the way through, and they are as sweet as a mouthful of jam. They are so good. And in a blink, they'll be gone, which is very sad, but the consolation is that there will be raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and marionberries (which are kind of like blackberries), and those seasons are longer. Soon we'll go out to this island in the Columbia River that's full of you-pick berry farms and we will get obsessive-compulsive and not be able to stop picking. With the raspberries and blackberries, especially it's like that: they're these endless walls of berries, right at eye level, and you just can't stop picking! Oregon is berry-land. Not just berries, but apples and pears in the fall, and grapes of course -- wine grapes, that is. I don't know about table grapes. And cherries! Amazing cherries. I [heart] summer.

Oh, so I was making some banana muffins today -- the third batch in as many weeks because we can't seem to eat the bananas fast enough; with the increased heat, they just turn so fast. Darn it, that means muffins! The first batch I made with coconut and sunflower seeds, the second with blackberries, and this latest batch coincided nicely with the arrival of a flat of strawberries. So:
The strawberries made the batter a little pink, which was so cute I went ahead and added a teeny bit of food coloring. Because, you know: pink! But once baked, the pink is pretty subtle. Also, I overdid it on the bananas on this batch so they're not fluffy, and not really photogenic, but they taste good.


We went to see the movie "Up" last night -- oh my gosh it's soOoOoOoOoOoOo goOoOoOoOoOoOd!!! You have to see it!!! It's the new Pixar animated movie, in 3D, and it's just wonderful, so moving and funny and beautiful. My favorite Pixar yet, and I love them [almost] all. (The car one, not so much.) Jim and I both cried behind our 3D glasses, and we laughed a lot too. If you haven't planned to see it because you think it's for kids, it's really not. I think it's more for adults, though kids can certainly love it too. It's about love and loss, loneliness, putting off your dreams, seizing your dreams, adventure, longing, friendship, and . . . more. And there's an awesome dog in it :-)