Psychic conditioner

Greetings from Flat City. There’s not much to say about this place. It has plenty of stores and plenty of subdivisions and plenty of air-conditioning. We’ve been staying indoors mostly, me writing, Jim redesigning his website. Going over to his sister’s house to play with our niece Grace, who’s two and a half, and avoiding holding our new niece, Abigail, who’s a month old. Newborns are amazing and all, but they scare me, and they’re not all that fun to play with -- have you ever noticed that? I remember my disappointment when my sister was born. I was five and I thought I was getting a little sister to play with. Not so much! Of course, she got more interesting later on.

(Hi Em!)

Speaking of my sister -- she's the snake doctor -- she’s getting married in a few weeks, which explains us being still in California. Thought we might as well stay. Weird to be away from home so long. I really can’t wait to get back to our little house and my polka dot ceiling. Sure, you can write anywhere, but you know, I’m a creature of habit and I want my habits back, my huge morning coffee, my green bench, all of it. I’m doing what I can here, but I kind of just want to loll around and read books by all the writers I’ve been meeting. I love reading books by people I've met!

I just read the advance copy of Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why. Whoa. It’s a great, original premise for a book, extremely sensitive and insightful and quietly, unsparingly tragic. And there’s no melodrama -- it just tells this very real story. If I were to try to tell someone what happened to Hannah Baker, I wouldn’t be able to make you understand. The story has to unfold, and Jay does unfold it, and he makes you feel it, the intensity of being a teenager when even little things seem so enormous and inescapable. Reading it, I kept getting swept up in anger. Anger at the snowballing circumstances, at how things can go slightly wrong, and then wronger and wronger, and I was angry at Jay for telling this story -- but I mean that in a good way. I’m sure he wants his readers to feel anger, and it works. If you don’t know, the book is about teen suicide. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that. And how can you not feel anger and helplessness when confronted with that subject? Well done, Jay! Thanks for the ARC -- I owe you a book.

I’m also rereading Valiant by Holly Black and enjoying the heck out of it. What a smooth storyteller she is, and what a strange world she creates. I’m so in it now, I won’t be able to get any writing done. You know what that means: it's time to cut myself off. After I finish it I won’t be allowed to start any more books for a while. I have to crack down on myself. Reading is just so much easier than writing that if I let myself I would do only that. Sigh.

Update on the pink hair. Sigh. Hair grows fast. Who knew? I don’t want roots! I just want Tonks-pink hair and no maintainence. But it doesn’t work that way. Do I re-pink? Yes, I think I shall re-pink. For now anyway. As for the future, we shall see. Speaking of hair, after Jim showered today, he called out from the bathroom:

"Hey sweetie? You know how sometimes couples have a kind of psychic bond or intuition and they can tell when the other one is hurt or in trouble or something?"

Me: "Um. Yeah?"

Jim: "Well, are you getting any intuition about whether I conditioned my hair, because I was spacing out in the shower and I can't remember if I did or not."

ha ha. I did not have any psychic flashes about Jim's conditioner. Sorry I couldn't help, sweetie.

[Oh, and a few minutes later he called out, "You're totally going to blog that, aren't you?" -- and I was just thinking exactly that. There's intuition for you!]

Oh, and my new desktop on my laptop is totally Boba Fett holding my book. Awesome.