Little a this, little a that

-- I did some spastic lurch maneuver getting out of bed this morning and knocked my lamp off my bedside table and broke it. Wah! I love that lamp! I've had it less than a year, whereas the terrible one I had before that managed to sit there and not get knocked off for some 10 years. Stupid stupid. It may be glue-able.

-- This was after Clementine decided to be awake at 6 am practicing her raspberries. (I'd gone to sleep around 2). And her raspberries are really LOUD. So, I'm tired.

-- Oh, she got kissed by a boy already, ha ha. At story time at the library, a 10-1/2-month-old name Jake crawled over to her and gave her a wet kiss on the top of the head. So cute! Then he tried to steal her toy.

-- I wrote another chapter yesterday! Short, but still: all new words, a chapter, in a day. Around 11 pm last night I was trying to finish it and my battery was almost in red so I was racing, and it reminded me of this story about Ray Bradbury, and how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 on the pay-typewriters in the basement of the UCLA library. He'd feed dimes into them and then GO! Like writing as a sprint. You couldn't just sit there and ponder next words. I've always marveled that Fahrenheit 451, in its perfection (have you read it lately? DO.) could have been written like that. Anyway, this wasn't that, but it reminded me of that story.

-- Which in turn reminded me of a Harlan Ellison essay I was reading, the intro to his story collection Shatterday, which I just got from the library because Neil Gaiman said it was the book that most influenced his career as a writer. -- "did more to turn the almost-22-year-old me into the writer I would one day become than anything else" -- (And it is a really good essay, and Ellison's reasons for being a writer are way better than my own, which are kind of the same reasons I used to play Barbies: because I can make people do stuff like go skinnydipping and be veterinarians and kiss.) Anyway, at one point in the essay, Ellison tells how he's racing to finish a story because he's literally got to rush to a reading that night and read it out loud to people, and he does, without even rereading it himself first. Sigh. That there are writers who can DO that.

-- By the way, my all-time favorite short story ever is Harlan Ellison's The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore. Read it.

-- Oh, and I met Harlan Ellison once, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he was literally "on exhibit" as a working writer, sitting in the middle of this display of graphic novels and writing an actual short story on an actual typewriter (a typewriter!). Though he's a famous curmudgeon, he was very nice to me. He wouldn't answer questions about the above-mentioned story, though, but tried to make me answer them instead, but I got flustered and fled.

-- Did you know YA books are not "real books"? I just found this out by reading an interview with an Oregon writer, in which she answered the question What are you working on currently? as so: "At the moment I'm ghostwriting a young adult novel, working on proposals for two young adult novels (to be published—if I'm fortunate enough to to sell them—pseudonymously), and mapping out the plot and characters for my next "real novel."

Ack!!! Her next REAL NOVEL!!!

Note to "grownup writers": if you don't consider YA novels to be "real," please do not write them, pseudonymously or otherwise :-( There are those of us who believe young people deserve actual books, not "fake" ones by writers who are ashamed to put their real names on them. (Also note: I may be misinterpreting this and being a b****, and if so, I apologize.)

Okay, off to attack another chapter.

Does anyone have a pay typewriter I can borrow? And a roll of dimes?