What's in the suitcase?

What, this suitcase? This is the suitcase of mystery, for my school visits this week. Volunteers will be called, knowing not what they volunteer for. And then, the suitcase of mystery will be opened to reveal. . .

WIGS!

Five different pink wigs! I can't wait to see the kids wearing these. Heh heh hee! Today I've been readying my slide show and props. Besides the wigs, there are butterflies:
(These sweeties died of old age in a butterfly zoo.)

And of course, there's famous BOX OF CLAWS:

Aren't those just SO COOL? One lucky student will be appointed the Guardian of the Claws, and will be responsible for bringing the box around to show everyone. (The claws will be sewn to the lining by then.) That student will also have to wear a pink wig. I got a single pair of faerie wings too, for the student in charge of the butterflies -- I think I'll pick a girl for that.

So looking forward to these events. Fingers crossed that all technical stuff goes well!

fun with insect sex

In the mood for something silly, bizarre, and educational? Let me put that another way: how would you like to see Isabella Rossellini perform pelvic thrusts on a giant stuffed praying mantis? It's all in the name of art and science. Go to Green Porno. Don't be scared off by the "porno" -- it's just insect porn, and it's on the Sundance Channel website, so it couldn't be too porny. (I like adding 'y' to words. Have you ever told someone to "stop acting assy"? Try it. It's fun.)
Anyway, they're short movies that are like these pictures, except that Isabella Rossellini plays every role! I totally love when she runs away from the spider. Thanks, Abi, for the link!
Oh, I'm still soliciting quotes for the new Laini's Ladies. Thanks for the suggestions so far! Here's another quote for you, that I love but that won't make it onto a lady:

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
-- Terry Pratchett

And another:

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangle orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."
-- Katherine Mansfield

Looky: new Laini's Ladies goodies!

The other day I got my shipment of samples of the new product: candles, bookmarks, and sticky notes along with the new cards and ladies. I love getting samples. It's kind of like Christmas. (Speaking of kind-of-like-Christmas, the other day I got 2 boxes in the mail from bloggy ladies. One was full of all kinds of candy and maple syrup, from the delightful blue poppy, the other two awesome "fairy cupcake" mugs from Meg -- though I have to give one of them to Alexandra. Sure, Meg, I'll pass that mug right along. Sure. Wink wink. No, I will. Thank you ladies for the packages of fun!)

Here's what the new sticky notes look like. They come in awesome little boxes:

And some of the many bookmark designs:



(There are lots more here.) (If you happen to be the bookmark-orderer for Barnes & Noble or Target or something, please place a gigantic order now.)

I need to design some new ladies now, like right now, which is. . . interesting timing considering the revisions in progress. But isn't that just the way things happen? Any quote requests? My mind is wide open right now. It's quite a challenge coming up with good Laini's Ladies quotes. Things to consider:

- Can't be by someone alive and likely to sue.

- Must have a fairly wide appeal.

- Must be either funny or uplifting.

- Must be relatively short.

- And finally, must have that certain undefinable awesomeness that makes you want to hang it in your house and reread it often. It's tricky. Ideas? Here's an example of one that, although I really really really love it, may not be a keeper. I'm being told people don't get it, which worries me a little. There's obviously not enough reading of Jane Austen novels OR enough appreciation of silliness going on out there!

Thoughts on Revisions

Here are some things I've learned to do when working on revisions:

Pretend like someone else wrote it.

If you can detatch from your manuscript and look at it with the cool eyes of a stranger, you'll be more able to do what needs to be done. Don't let yourself remember the joy and pain of creating that particular character or chapter. You're the calm, cool stranger reading this book for the first time. Even better: you're like the scary mercenary that gets hired in a movie when a hit goes wrong, like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, the one that can fix anything. Yeah, that's you, the scary mercenary who can fix anything -- and isn't going to get all weepy and mopey about it.

Be willing to change anything. Anything.

Don't cling. You're not married to that first draft. That first draft is more like a first date, and you get to go on lots more dates before you decide whether you're going to marry it. (I realize now this is not a good metaphor. I am not advocating you try to fix the people you date and turn them into your perfect mate. It doesn't work with people. But it does work with manuscripts. Yay!)

Remember: your book can get better. And better. And better.

It's unlikely your first idea is the best possible idea for any given situation. Revisions are an opportunity to take a raw thing and make it SO. MUCH. BETTER. Don't just fiddle around with the sentences as you've written them. Cast your mind out wide for any new ideas that might make your story more exciting, more beautiful, more whatever. Be willing to rewrite A LOT, to cut whole chapters and write whole new chapters.

A quote:

"It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it." -- Mark Twain

Love that. Dance on your mind. Go forth and revise.

Oh yeah, and:

"It is never too late -- in fiction or in life -- to revise." -- Nancy Thayer

Lips Touch

Lips Touch. That is the new title for Goblin Fruit -- probably. I really like it. It's a book about kissing, after all, and "lips touch" sounds sexy, but still kind of abstract. And, it's true: in this book, lips do touch. It's also the 2nd line from the story "Spicy Little Curses Such As These," one of the book's three tales. So, that's the new title, unless it gets changed again!

(None of the lips are orangutan lips, by the way, though now I think of it, there is an orangutan reference in one story. Not a kissing orangutan, though. Something much worse!)

I am massively in revision mode now, and on TWO BOOKS.
Though there was oodles of time for these two books --Silksinger and Goblin Fruit Lips Touch -- to get spaced out at decent intervals, I kind of knew I would end up getting my editorial letters for both at the same time (that's Lips Touch on top, Silksinger on the bottom -- word of advice: write short books. They're so neat and tidy!). But it's okay: one is a very light edit, which is wonderful, because the other is a very not-light edit! I fully expected that, though, and fully embrace it, and feel so grateful to have someone (several someones) to read my manuscripts so closely, with so much care to helping me make a book the best it can be. I do not say this to suck up. I'm pretty sure neither of my editors reads this blog, and I think they both know how much I love the revision process -- really, really, and truly.

Right now, with the task of carving 20,000 words off Silksinger (!!!), I am full of excitement about diving back in and making the book much better than it is now. Yippeeeee! Let me at it! Wooo hooooooo! {I'm seriously not joking. Give me revisions over a first draft. First drafts are the terrifying part! I did hear a good quote at the conference, though: "Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist." -- Jane Smiley} Well, these first drafts exist and will soon become second drafts. All the fun and excitement of travel and conferences are now in the past, and I will be spending much, much time in my writing room for the next several months!

By the way, Iron Man rocks. Here I am with Liesa, James, and Iron Man at dinner before going to see the movie on opening night.
There was a little boy at the next table who was seriously coveting our toy. We play-blasted him with the blasty thingy. Here is Jim pretending Iron Man is a cell phone. Don't even try to tell me you don't do that too.

Chiapas Trip Part 3 - Palenque and the jungle/ Chiapas Travel

All is not yet told with our trip to Mexico. So far we have wandered around San Cristobal eating walnut popsicles and banana soup, attended strange religious rites in a Mayan village church, waded in a waterfall (when we really should have swum), spooked some crocodiles off some river banks, and consumed our weight in mangoes (daily). Next stop: the Lacandon rainforest and the ancient Mayan city of Palenque.

The Lacandon is the western hemisphere's most significant rainforest north of the Amazon, and is home to a huge percentage of Mexico's biodiversity. Jaguars, ocelots, howler monkeys, toucans, crocodiles, and many other exciting beasties, not to mention Zapatistas. Of course, we saw almost none of those things in our brief excursion to the jungle -- just howler monkeys, but that was what I most wanted to see, so it's okay.

Let me begin telling this story by saying that our first four days in Chiapas, the weather was perfect. Blue skies and all. And whenever we would meet a traveler who'd come from Palenque, they'd say, without exception, "It is SO HOT. Rivers of sweat. Streaming, dripping sweat." And other graphic descriptions of amounts of sweat. I was a little trepidatious about this, not being a sweat-lover, but I was game for the jungle -- eager for the jungle -- and I figured sweat was just part of the scene. So.

When we woke early early to catch our bus, and it was raining quite heavily, I was not afraid. We had a five-hour drive ahead of us. I guess I just assumed there was a little patch of rain hovering over San Cristobal, but that our bus would drive away from it, and then it would be sunny. The first problem was that our van was full, and it being full, there was no room in it for our backpacks. The backpacks had to go on top. In the rain. "There is a cover," said the driver, proceeding to climb up on top and start arranging said cover. It seems to me now quite ominous in retrospect, that he did not want any of us to help him, or even to watch him. Could that be because the cover didn't. . . cover? Well.

We drove, and drove. The roads in Chiapas are not only snakey-curvy, but they are fraught with speedbumps. More speedbumps that you have ever seen in your life. You're zooming along, then you squeal to a stop for another series of speedbumps. You jounce around a lot. It's fine. You get used to it. There are a lot of little villagey encampments right alongside the road, a lot of strolling livestock, hence the bumps. We drove. The rain did not abate.

We reached our first stop of the day, the long-anticipated Agua Azul waterfall, where I had hoped to fulfill the "swim in a waterfall" dream (well, I have swum in waterfalls, in Hawaii and here in Oregon, but I really really wanted to swim here. Look how blue this is, how beautiful. . .



Um, I got those photos off Google. Here's what it looked like when we were there:

Not azul. Not on April 14, 2008! Oy. What you can't tell from this photo is what I had to go through to get this photo. See, the rain had flooded the waterfall. The river had leapt its banks and turned all the pathways into rivers, all the stairways into waterfalls. To even get to the viewpoints we had to walk upstream against the tide of these newborn little rivers, and they were brown and powerful and you couldn't see where you were stepping and. . . people started falling into holes.

The local kids could have stopped it, they could have called out, "No, not that way!" but they didn't. They sat back and howled with laughter. It was pretty funny. Until, er, I fell in the water! Oy, up to my waist. And I was wearing jeans. Soaked, heavy jeans! Bleh. And that was to be the extent of the "swimming" at Agua Azul! DRAT!

At our next stop, the waterfall of Misol Ha, I bought a skirt so that I could change out of my jeans. It was a cute skirt, too! But I needn't have bothered -- we went on to Palenque and by the time we'd been there for ten minutes, I was entirely drenched again! It was the most extraordinary rain I have ever encountered. It was ludicrous rain. The sky was just plain showing off. You really couldn't see. The whole world was a waterfall. And here we were, at Palenque, a wonder of the ancient world, a once-in-a-lifetime (maybe) trip! What to do? Well, of course we had to go and see what we could, rain or not. So we bought cheapo ponchos and waded in.

Remember what everyone told us about Palenque? How hot? Streams of sweat? Not so much! Oh my GOD. The rain. Everywhere the standing water was well above our ankles and we slogged through, laughing hysterically inside our ponchos, looking like a little troupe of wet hunchback ghosts. Here we are:
And here's beautiful, mysterious Palenque, lost in the mist:
Well, on a normal day, so we're told, Palenque gets between 1400 and 6000 tourists tramping around. This day, there were about 5. At the time it was comical, but now I feel like we were lucky to witness such a ferocious act of nature, and to have this spot to ourselves.

Did I mention that they haven't had this sort of out-of-season storm in over 20 years? Ha! Well, we were also told that as insane as the rain was, it was just "a shower" compared to the storms of late summer. Wow.

And the best part of the day was yet to come. After we'd finished our slog and were about to get back on the bus, the rain abated almost entirely and a series of incredibly eerie roars started to echo through the trees. Monkeys! Yay, yay, yay! Monkeys! They're called "howler" monkeys, but this is an incredible misnomer. They don't howl. They ROAR. They sound like monsters, and they were all around, roaring back and forth. We could see them moving through the treetops and the sound, it was just insanely alien and freaky and COOL. It made my day.

The day ended at El Panchan, which is a kind of "backpacker village" in the jungle just a few kilometers away from Palenque:
Set amid dense trees and a crisscrossing of streams, there are a number of hostels and cabanas, and a really really good restaurant called Don Mucho's, where you sit under a thatched palapa and listen to really really good live music while drinking cervezas and maragaritas and eating delicious "Mexican-Italian food."
It's really very good that there was this pleasant end to the day, even if I had to go to dinner dressed in Jim's swim trunks and oversize sweatshirt because my own clothes were ruined. Ruined. As expected, my backpack was wet. Not just wet: saturated. Everything in it could have just been fished out of a river, that's how wet. And that's not all. The new scarf I had bought at the market in San Cristobal had bled blue all over everything. I now was the owner of many extremely wet, extremely tie-tyed clothes! And my brand-new hair dryer was dead, so I couldn't even dry my wet soppy hair! Oh. If it wasn't for the good food, the cervezas and the margarita, I would probably have cried. At least El Panchan is just the kind of place where you can go to dinner in your husband's swim trunks and no one will think anything of it!

Here's adorable little "Nyeli," who's half-Tsotsil/half-Canadian, and who just loves to dance:
To wrap up the rest of the tale in a quick and slap-dash way, we spent the next day at the gorgeous ruins of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, deeper down in the Lacandon. Look at this ENORMOUS TREE. It makes me feel like a fairy!We took a river trip along the Usumacinta, which makes the border with Guatemala, we heard a whole lot more howler monkeys, and ended the day once more with good music, good food, cervezas, and margaritas under a palapa in the jungle. Oh yeah, there was chocolate cake too!

And the next day, with sun shining, we returned to Palenque and really saw it. It was gorgeous, the weather was perfect, and it wasn't even hot or humid! We hired a guide and he told us a lot of interesting history and identified trees and bird sounds (heard toucans, didn't see them), and all in all, it was beautiful. Here's the biggest pyramid; the red circle is there for scale (there's a wee little person inside it!)



And that's our trip to the jungle! Next time I go somewhere with jungle, I really want to experience JUNGLE. I want to take a Sierra Club trip or something, camp in a jungle, ride an elephant, see huge creepy spiders, that sort of thing. (Jim might not so much want that, though). But this was a glimpse, and good to get it now. Sadly, the Lacandon is being cut down at an absolutely alarming rate, like every other forest in the world. If you want to see trees, you should probably see them soon.

{If you didn't know this, you should: Bush is pushing hard to log Sequoia National Monument. Yah. Sequoia National Monument. Whaaa? Now is a really time to become a Sierra Club member and help combat this insanity.}

Imagine cupcakes

Not this cupcake**. This is made of felt. The ones that are made of sugar and buttercream and other edible (but inadvisable) things, you have to imagine, because I didn't have my camera with me today when Jim and I and new friends Liesa and James happened upon Cupcake Jones in the Pearl District. The moment I saw the cupcakes through the window... I knew they were no ordinary cupcakes. Listen to this, and conjure the image in your head:

baklava cupcake -- cardamom cake filled with honey pistachio pastry cream topped with honey pistachio buttercream, candied pistachios and filo wedges. Uh huh. That's what I had. Well, that's what I had first.

snickers cupcake -- caramel velvet cake filled with whipped chocolate peanut ganache topped with caramel buttercream, chocolate and caramel drizzles and chopped peanuts. That's what I had second.

Yum.

And listen to what's on the menu for later in the week: "Mallomar cupcake with homemade marshmallows and graham crackers," a "linzer cookie cupcake" -- that one involves brown sugar hazelnut cake. Brown sugar hazelnut cake? Oh. Yum. And, oh my god, they make an "almond joy" cupcake, chocolate filled with coconut cream topped with almond buttercream frosting. Ack! I'm getting fat just thinking about these!

Calm down, Laini. Calm.

Well, we had a really nice afternoon, cupcakes and books and Vietnamese food with new friends. We met Liesa and James at the conference last weekend, and they are spending a few days in Portland before heading home to New York/New Jersey, so we got to hang out. Liesa is an editor at Simon and Schuster, and it was fun going through the YA and Middle Grade sections at Powell's with her; I bought a couple of books she's edited. It was also fun seeing James' eyes bug out when he discovered the photography section. Powell's = Paradise. In the event of an apocalypse, that is where I want to be, and if at all possible, I'd like for the Whole Foods and Cupcake Jones to remain fully operational (okay, and Anthropologie too). Apocalypse Schmocalypse. Yes?

Belatedly, a few blog posts by attendees of the conference last weekend. It was really great to meet both Stephanie and Elise. I look forward to reading your books, as soon as may be! (Oh, and: Stephanie has blue hair. Yay!)

**For the adorable felty cupcakes pictured above, click here.