Grow Wings -- the Journal of Laini Taylor

I've moved! Blogs, that is.

2011-01-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

New year, new decade, new thoughts and plans, it seemed a new blog was in order. Please come visit me in my new home, where things are bigger and brighter, still in the works, and with room to grow. I'm loving it there!

CLICK HERE FOR LAINI'S NEW BLOG.

Home at last, and: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2011-01-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

Well, hello there. If you are seeing this, thank you for stopping by after my mysterious disappearance! I meant to post that I would be traveling in December, but the post never got written, and I can count the minutes I've been near a computer in the past month on one hand! But I am back! Back from, to be specific, Morocco and Italy.

Morocco:

Italy:

More on that to come. Much more! But right now It is 1-1-11. New Year's Day. I love me a new year. I like to think of New Year's as the "Emperor of Mondays." Mondays, I know, are not everyone's favorite day of the week, but I love Mondays. For some reason, Mondays have always felt like clean slates to me, like . . . new notebooks. You know? Like a fresh etch-n-sketch screen. The feeling is: begin now.

Whatever it is, BEGIN IT NOW.

On New Year's, that feeling amplifies a millionfold. I am massively excited about 2011, for many reasons. 2010 was oh so good to me, a life-changing year, a holler-with-joy kind of year, a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming year. What will 2011 hold? Many more firsts for Clementine. Talking! Wanting to pick out her own wonderful mismatch outfits. Continuing to become her little-person-self. A new book to write! And one to shepherd to the shelves, a process filled with anxiety and glee. Jim's and my 10th wedding anniversary, this June. Ten years of marriage, the very best of marriages. From art school parking lot to a gondola in Venice, up to Portland, Oregon and creating our little Pie, not to mention our books, and more on the way.

Gratitude. Looking back, looking ahead, I am filled with it. I love New Year's. Clementine is napping now, hopefully getting over jet lag (we were all up in the middle of the night eating pancakes, which -- hey! -- was not so terrible!), and enabling me to crack open my computer for the first time in a month. I haven't gotten to email yet. Oy, how I hate the junk that daily clogs my inbox. Will tackle that next.

I am feeling an urge to totally overhaul this blog and really dig into it this year. It has become a bit ... thin ... of late, and I don't just mean this month. I have ideas of how I'd like it to be, and I think I might begin again, a whole new address, a fresh sidebar and banner, a clean start. Maybe. If Clementine naps a while longer :-)

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so happy to be back home!

Lips Touch alternate cover up for auction

2010-11-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, have you ever seen this painting? It's by Jim, and it is an alternate Lips Touch cover he did during the whole cover conception process. I love it. It is actually hanging in my writing room! It is also now up for auction -- as a 13x20 print on canvas (mounted on stretcher bars; it looks like an original painting on canvas; FYI there *is* no "original" of this because it was finished digitally, so it exists in its purest form in the ether.) -- to benefit Bridget Zinn, our lovely Portland writing friend who has been valiantly battling stage IV colon cancer for nearly two years -- that's nearly two years of constant chemo, and now a new treatment for which she is traveling to Arizona a week of every month. There are a lot of totally awesome items up for auction, including this painting, which includes a signed copy of Lips Touch.

Browse, bid, and help Bridget and Barrett out with their medical costs.

Thank you! And really, this Thanksgiving, give deepest and most heartfelt thanks for your health. Because, boy o boy. Not everyone is so lucky.

Direct link to the painting HERE.

Stop and Smell the ... Violin?

2010-11-20T20:19:00.000-08:00

This is not new, and I may be the last person to hear about it, but my mom just emailed me the story which I find verrry interesting. See here:

THE SITUATION

In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About 4 minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

At 6 minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At 10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent - without exception - forced their children to move on quickly.

At 45 minutes:

The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

After 1 hour:

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities.

This experiment raised several questions:

*In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

*If so, do we stop to appreciate it?

*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made . . ..

How many other things are we missing as we rush through life?

Enjoy life NOW .. it has an expiration date

* * * * * *

I Snope's it and it's true (story here), and it makes me think a couple of things:

1) Classical musical literacy in this country is all but nil (myself included). We don't know great from good when we hear it. Heck, I scarcely know great from bad! This is sad. I wish I'd had an education in classical music. I know it's not too late, of course. It's all priorities. But ... our priorities, our educational system ... so much is lost. As a culture, we put our time into the most mediocre forms of entertainment, things that dull our minds instead of exalting them. Will this be a footnote in some alien textbook on the ruin of human civilization on Earth?

2) I want to be the person who stops and listens, even if I don't recognize it as great. When you think about what kind of person you would like to be ... what do you see? Suppose you were writing the *ideal you* as a character in a novel. In this scenario, my *ideal Laini* would not only stop, but would end up engaging the violinist in conversation and finding out -- what!? gasp!! -- that he was Joshua Bell, who even I have heard of. It would be meaningful. It would be cool. It would be a story I could tell forever, how I was the *only* person who stopped to listen that day Joshua Bell played incognito in the subway station. If I were *ideal Laini* I would have a ton of anecdotes like that, because I would be alert to life, I would be engaged.
Wouldn't you like to be that person? How to be that person? Think about it. Think about being *ideal you.*

3. I want to listen to more classical music. I want Clementine to listen to more classical music. Tonight Jim's beginning guitar class had a concert, and she was so engaged. It's awesome. She just drinks up live music. Her face is like light. More. More more more. Lucky to live in a city with music everywhere, free or cheap, and for all ages. Portland, I [heart] you.

Catching up, plans, MOROCCO!, and some writing room pics

2010-11-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

Oh such a shameful shocking lapse in blogging. I just can't get my blogging act together. Some things that are going on:

--Clementine under the weather. A little cold plus a little teething = a little misery :-(

-- Starting a new book. Wooo hooooo! So exciting! So scary, inspiring, and wonderful! Have come up with some ideas that totally set my brain on fire. I am currently in love with the opening scene.

-- Laini's Ladies emergency. That is, I find myself with a sudden deadline and new designs to produce in the midst of much else going on.

-- Assorted "much else" in the way of life stuff -- good stuff, but busy-making.

-- Impending copy-edits. Eeek! Will be receiving tomorrow!

-- Revisiting the title of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which just isn't quite right. Wracking my brain for a kick-a** title.

--Preparing to go on a trip! Yay!!!!!! Guys, we're finally going to Morocco!!!!!!! Yippeeeeee! I have been in a daydream-land of kasbahs and camels, zellij tiles and carpet souks, tajines and caftans, mountain, desert, beach, city. Seriously: the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Atlas Mountains, and Marrakesh. Oooooooh, names out of fairy tales. I am SO EXCITED I CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT. I want to see the goats in the argan trees. Date oases on the fringe of the Sahara, with mud-brick castles baking in the winter sun. Leather slippers in every color, all lined up, gorgeous as candies. Mountains of oranges in the Jemaa el-Fna.

How cool of a UNESCO designation is this: "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity". I think that that designation was created specifically for the Jemaa el-Fna, which the heart of Marrakesh, this big madhouse of a square filled with acrobats and henna artists, snake charmers, musicians, street dentists (ouchy!), storytellers, and more more more. And food, of course. Here it is at night:

And here is one of the most famous kasbahs, Ait benhaddou. It may be familiar to you from being in many movies, including Gladiator:

And oh the luxury, the luxury. Part of the awesomeness of traveling in Morocco is that even the hotels are destinations, and I don't mean just the expensive ones. Here are some pictures of the "modest" riad where we will be staying:

(Look at this ceiling!!! And the tilework! Oh my oh my. Camera, I think you are going to get some use :-)

Oh my gosh, I am so in love with this country, and I haven't even been there yet! Can't WAIT to show you my own pictures. It will be a little while yet, but just you wait. Photos will be had. Forced on you. I will sucker you in and make you watch my two-hour trip slideshow of Clementine riding a camel, Clementine wearing a tarbouche cap (fez), Clementine on a magic carpet, etc etc. Tee hee.

In the meantime, some pictures I can show. My writing room is in the new issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors -- the Studio edition. Yay! I haven't seen it yet, but am dying to. But here are some of the pics I sent in. Don't know which they will have used:

On another note, I was following the National Book Awards on Twitter last night. Has it already been a year??? Whoa. Congrats to all the winners!

And lastly, a book recommendation. Best book I've read in a long while: Plain Kate by Erin Bow. Such gorgeous gorgeousness! Erin Bow is an award-winning poet, and it shows in her marvelous prose: so evocative and lovely (without being flowery or "poem-y," never fear). But it's not just the prose. The storytelling, the imagination, and the heart -- and heartbreak are all tippy top. My favorite kind of book. It actually made me well up numerous times, and I am not a teary-eyed reader, usually! I could try to tell you the plot, but I have a deadline to get back to, so best you just read the flap when you go to buy it! :-)

More pretty :-)

2010-11-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

So I'm totally in love with this Dutch artist, Jane something (her last name is not anywhere! I have come across it, but can't find it now. Starts with an 'S'. Schouten? Anyway, find her HERE). Is she even Dutch? I don't know. Maybe she just lives in the Netherlands. You see, I know nothing. But check out this colorful wonderfulness:

(Love this pillow. And there's a how-to for these vases here.)

Wonderful: modern chairs and stools reupholstered in vintage blankets that she has embroidered and appliqued. WANT.

These are pulled from inspiration pages:

Just because ... it's pretty

2010-11-07T10:34:00.001-08:00

I've been feeling decoratey lately. Dreamy-decoratey. Dreaming of a new house, bigger house, new decorating possibilities. Dream dream dream. I have this little folder on my desktop for inspiration, and this is what's in it. Just ... pretty. A random selection. Most of these come via the fabulous decor8:

Such cute craftiness!

I love this Anthropologie display, the way they have the random drawers on the bookcase for organization? How cute is that? Love Anthropologie. Love love love.

This, apparently, is done by cutting designs out of big floral wallpaper and decoupaging onto a cabinet. Cute!

I think that I would love to have a space filled with giant colorful poufs. I think kids would love it too.

Click on this one to embiggen. It's so purty.

Awesome DIY glass ball chandelier. I have my eye on you.

Have a beautiful day!

Just ... start writing? Gasp sputter!

2010-11-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

So, you know how awesome it is to write a book? To finish a book? If you don't yet know this, I can tell you: it is the awesomest. I just want to keep reading it over and over and gloating. I wrote another book. Yay, me!!!

But. There's a downside. The downside of finishing a book is that you have to -- ulp! -- start writing another book. Just like that. Out of thin air! Don't get me wrong: this is its own awesome, but the beginning, the huge blankness, it's ... well, you probably know. It's the most magical and terrifying of things. The perfect gleam of possibility, like a newly snowed field as yet unmarked by tracks. Daunting!

I've written four novels now. FOUR! (If you don't count the god-awful misbegotten thing I clawed out of my brain one fateful NaNo several years ago and have been trying ever since to forget). And it some ways, it DOES get easier each time. In the sense that you know you can do it. And this last book, it was a revelation and education to me in efficiency. The first book I've written as a mom. Written in time available. Okay, I'm lucky there -- I have work hours; I have 4-5 hours a day to just write. Once upon a time, that seemed like nothing. Now, I know it is enough. If I use it to write, that is, and not blog. (Ahem.)

So, here I go, starting another book. I've got a brand new Scrivener project doc going, complete with a "Working Doc" in which I have begun to spill my brainstorming thoughts and plans for this book. I had thought I would give myself some time -- weeks, even -- to just do that: What if this? What if that? Just brainstorm, write about the book, because it's easier than actually diving in and writing scenes, and it's a good way to ease in. But after a few hours of brainstorming, and with a solid idea of how I want to start the book, I'm thinking I ought to just ... start the book.

You know?

Planning is great. Brainstorming is great. I love it because it is this huge world to wander in. I can think up anything, and it is a zero-stress environment. It is an environment I return to again and again and again throughout the writing of a book. What now? and once again, What now?

But ... it's in the writing that the magic happens. That's the time of pure creation. It's kind of like the Miller-Urey experiment in which you create the conditions for life and then zap it with simulated lightning and see what happens. The joy and excitement and terror are here, in the primal soup of story. If I have an idea of how to begin, I should just do it right? The only reason not to is: FEAR.

Stupid fear. Fear is not a good enough reason!

As far as just diving in and starting to write, I have found that it helps to think of this phase as the creation of raw material, and not as "the book." In the last book, I did this a fair amount, early on, and I found that later -- even much later -- in the writing, I was able to plunder that raw material and use it. It was not for nothing! The thing is, writing about the story (which I totally condone, in its place), you are on the outside looking in. Writing the story, you are in it. And only when you are in it, do "things happen" -- mystical unexpected things, like flashes of lightning animating chemicals to produce amino acids out of slush. Get into a scene and go, make the characters talk to each other and do things. It might be something you can use, it might not. If it's not, just keep going: create more raw material, until you "find" it.

Remember: you're writing to find the story just as much as you are writing to tell the story.

I'm pep-talking myself right now to begin doing just this. There's this part of me that still thinks that writing a book is something you have to build up to, a monumental task you have to gird yourself for. But really, you can just do it. Start it. It's like dieting: you tell yourself you're starting next week because you have to "get ready," right? OR, you can just ... not eat that scone and start NOW.

So, am I going to do it? Start the book? No. I can't think of it like that! My brain, my brain. The convolutions of my brain will not allow it. What I am going to do is: start writing scenes, generating raw material. If I think of it like that, I can do it. I think.

Plus, this is a sequel, so the characters are right there in my brain, where they have been all year. (This is the sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which by the way will be out in October, and may yet change title; stay tuned. It's in copy editing right now; I will see it again soon.)

By the way, the past few days have been an autumn extravaganza around here. So so wonderful. The leaves are doing their magical thing, and the weather has been gorgeous. At the park the other day, a genius mom had brought a rake and she made some massive leaf piles on the tennis court, and this might as well have been an amusement park for all the kids -- the glee, the games that came out a few leaf piles! Heaven.

Yesterday, we seized the possibility of one of the last sunny days and drove out to the Columbia River Gorge for our favorite hike: along Eagle Creek to Punchbowl Falls. Clementine was on my back, and snoozed a good part of the way, preparation for upcoming travels to faraway lands :-) Thank you, world, for the conjunction of sunshine with the changing leaves. These few days have been splendid!

Halloween isn't so bad ...

2010-11-01T11:39:00.001-07:00

So, it turns out that Clementine is a fan of Halloween. Shocker! Man, we had so much fun yesterday! It's been a long time since I trick-or-treated, obviously, and I think it isn't what it used to be. So many houses did not participate! It seems like when I was a kid, every single house had a pumpkin on the porch and was open for business. Not so these days, but still, we had a wonderful time, and Clementine caught on quick! Here she is at her very first porch, getting her first treat ever, and from Ginny Weasely no less!

Yes, she was Superman.

We figure next year the years of fairy princesses will begin, so why not? Plus which, we needed a simple costume involving no head pieces to be yanked off. She was not the only Superman in town. Yesterday morning, Portland Children's Museum was the safest place in the Universe:

Clementine has not had a lot of chocolate in her life, but the few times she has tasted it, her little hands started frantically making the sign language for "MORE! MORE!" She is a fan. Yesterday, while trick-or-treating, she had a wrapped Kit Kat in her hands, and we didn't notice she had gnawed through the wrapper and was happily devouring herself some Kit Kat! And maybe a little wrapper too. When I tried to take it away to roll the wrapper down so she could actually have it, her one Halloween treat (no, not a whole Kit Kat!), she made feral animal sounds and bit my hand off at the wrist. Hee hee. Here, Kit Kat evidence in hand:

Sigh. So fun :-)

Meanwhile, making plans for Clementine's first international travel, upcoming, which just might involve a camel ride ... And maybe, if we're verrrrry lucky, a magic carpet or two!

"Waiting"

2010-10-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Check out this completely awesome photo my dad took. Doesn't it look like a book cover? I LOVE it. I would pick up that book.

Finished, oh so finished!

2010-10-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

Guess what. THE BOOK IS FINISHED! Final draft sent off at midnight! Yippeeeee! During my final read-through/futz, I did a random word-count and discovered that at that moment, the manuscript was exactly 100,000 words, which is kind of like looking at the clock exactly at 2:22 or something. It seems kind of cool, but is totally random and meaningless. So after that I kept checking, for no reason, as the book swung just below and just above the 100K mark, with the final coming in at 100,021. There's a perverse part of me that wants to cut 21 words in copyediting, ha ha!

But the important point is: it is finished!!! I am so so happy! It has been delightful working with Alvina Ling and her assistant Bethany, and that work is not over, of course, there are many phases yet ahead, but the meat of the edit is now ... hm, you start a meat metaphor, and then what? Do you just go with it? The meat of the edit is now chewed. Lovely. I should be a writer, snork snork.

So you know what I did to celebrate? I cleaned the kitchen! Am I wild or what? I cannot be controlled! Don't even try! Ha ha. But seriously. There are things that don't get high priority during deadline times, and I do so love a clean house. *happy sigh*

Obviously the blog is something else that has not gotten high priority! It's been a while since I posted any pictures of the Clementine, so here are some recents:

She's walking like a maniac now, not running yet, not fast, but I am sure that is only a matter of days. Climbs everything. Fascinated by dirt -- future gardener? Knows all her body parts and can say most of the words for them, the cutest being "elbow" which sounds kind of like "bolbow!" and is said with more glee than any elbow really merits :-) She helps us put groceries away and make the bed, handing us each item one by one, very serious about the whole procedure. Loves music like crazy. First thing in the morning, she toddles herself over the Jim's computer to wait for itunes to come up and someone to dance with her. That's the Clementine update, at 14.5 months of awesomeness.

The other day at Kinko's, while we waited for something, we were chatting with a woman, probably in her 60s? Here is a snippet of the exchange:

Her: Is she your first?

Jim: Yes.

Her: Probably your last, too, I guess.

.

.

.

.

What??? What does THAT mean? Do we look SO old? What is WRONG with people? Or did she have some extrasensory ovary perception and know something that we don't? Jeez, man. So rude. A friend of mine, once, was getting a wax or something, and when the person ... waxer? Waxist? asked her age, and she replied "35," the woman said, with some surprise, "You're only 35?" Can you believe that? I mean, someone in the beauty/cosmetic industry, who is supposed to default to making clients feel GOOD about themselves. Man, age sucks, and people are stupid. That's the lesson for today. I was also asked by an old man once at a restaurant if Clementine was my granddaughter!!! This one was a jaw-dropper. Yes, I technically could have a grandchild, but ... really???

Okay, little fingers are after the keyboard now, so I'm off. Great day, all!

Tighten tighten

2010-10-11T21:41:00.001-07:00

Tighten tighten.

One thing you need for revisions: a screwdriver. Not a real screwdriver. A language screwdriver. I read through the manuscript today on the lookout for unnecessary words. Maybe singletons, maybe whole paragraphs. One chapter, which incidentally was the first scene written and is now Chapter 13 (The Graverobber, in case the numbers change), went from 3500 words (it was the longest chapter in the book) to 2900. There was just stuff that had been in it for so long, I was used to looking at it. I'd forgotten to wonder whether every word was singing for its supper. Turns out: nope. Ciao. Tighten tighten.

A lot of it is just super-simple stuff like this:

before:
The long mustache that had once been his pride hung lank and tangled.

after:
The mustache that had been his pride hung lank and tangled.

before:
The elevator door closed, and she was alone with herself and her reflection

after:
The elevator door closed, and she was alone with her reflection

before:
She sensed from the tenor of Z’s voice that

after:
She sensed from Z’s agitation that

(Here's a doozy. Youch. To think this clunker might have snuck into the book.)
before:
A look of dismay edging on horror slowly spread over his face as understanding dawned.

after:
Dismay spread over his face as understanding dawned.

Those cuts add up! You can slice hundreds of words like this and never even miss them. This is an easy, restful part of revisions. That whole "writing new scenes" malarkey is so much harder, and I'm not *quite* done with that bit yet. I have one lingering section that needs some new material written to seam some stuff together. It makes my brain feel tired just thinking about it. Can't I just fiddle with my screwdriver instead? Well. I'm almost there. So close! Another day or two of this, and it's off into the ether again!

* * *
By the way, cool news: I am going to be a guest of honor at the 2011 Sirens Conference in Vail, Colorado! I'm so excited about this! It's a conference dedicated to women in fantasy literature, and it just happened last weekend -- wish I could have been there! The theme this year was "fairies" about which I have a thing or two to say :-) Next year, oh, this is so cool. Next year the theme is MONSTERS. Mwahahahahahahaha! In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, as in, I think, all my books, the idea of what really makes a monster is central theme. It's a whole year off, but I'm psyched. Also psyched about the other two guests of honor: Justine Larbalestier and Nnedi Okorafor, who are both AWESOME!

Do you have a favorite Lips Touch story?

2010-10-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

I'm curious :-) Do you have a favorite Lips Touch story? There's a little discussion going over at Readergirlz, if you would like to input your input.

I *might* say in comments which one *might* be my favorite.

I also *might* hint that I want to write more Druj stories. I was kind of stoked to have a google alert pop up a few hours after this hint that alerted me that, ahem, there are people in the world (or at least a person) excited by that prospect! Which is totally exciting to ME. Thank you Fantasy Cafe! To be clear, there is not an immediate Druj sighting on the horizon -- the horizon is all about Daughter of Smoke and Bone and sequel right now, but Druj are out there, all creepy with their pale eyes, waiting. My head has plans.

Please come over to Readergirlz and weigh in! Thank you!

Very Important

2010-10-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

Winners of the European Beard Competition. Isn't it weird that none of them has a ... beard? Three naked chinny chin chins. I'm just sayin'.

Stop Talking Blueberry

2010-10-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

Yeah, look at me, all vanishing again for a week, popping up with no coherent thoughts. Just: "Oog. Brain fuzzy." My brain is fuzzy. You know how the inside of your mouth feels kind of ... furry ... after eating cooked spinach? My head is like that. On the bright side, my head is now host to newly pink hair. Oh, my roots were so atrocious! Last hair appointment, we got all sidetracked and forgot to make my next appointment, and then by the time I realized it, my stylist was all booked! It was dire, seriously dire. So that I was wearing hats, and they were squeezing my brain and I was torn whether to take them off in public or not. Brain squeeze, roots, brain squeeze, roots.

I eventually chose in favor of brain comfort, and exposed my roots to the world. Or the world at the cafe where I was writing, anyway. As far as I know, everyone survived.

My lovely hair stylist pinked me at her house this evening, while Jim and Clementine hung out inside with her husband -- who was our first friend in Portland -- and kids. I am no longer a disgrace to the color pink, thank god!

You see what matters of incredible importance I blog about? Here's another one: I keep finding random things in my shirt. Shoved there by furtive baby fists. I think I catch, like, 85% of them going in, but there's that 15% or so that happen while I'm distracted and then fall out later. Like, a game piece, or a whole block. Things have fallen unceremoniously out of my bra that I would have sworn to you could never have gone unnoticed. And yet.

There's a whole food component too, but those tend to be in the 85%, especially the really awesome stuff, like sliced peaches. I might occasionally come across a cheerio though.

Brain had just notified me that it has exactly three coherent sentences left in it. That was one. There went another. Dog had to drive uphill but that's okay I like root beer don't you? Warm cheerios and then I waffle iron halleluja shut up. I've come to the end and kept talking you see what happens? So just. Stop. Talking. Blueberry.

Yonder grass is looking greenly

2010-10-01T08:49:00.001-07:00

Yes I love revisions, yes. I do.

But.

BUT.

NEXT, PLEASE.

I'm kinda ready to be done now! See, sometimes revisions are all cozy futz-futz, tinker-tinker, and other times, the need to write a new scene falls out of the sky, and my brain does not want to write a new scene. My brain is nonplussed. It's like, "I thought all that writing malarkey was over. I thought we were revising here." Yeah. Dirty secret: revising involves writing. It's like when you just mopped and somebody runs over your floor with muddy feet. You clap your hands to your cheeks and scream, "NOOOOOOOO!"

At least, that's my reaction to muddy feet.

Who am I kidding? I rarely mop. And the scene-writing is fine. It's just that as one nears the end, one gets so ready to be DONE. But it is hugely satisfying to take the almost-book and polish it to a high gloss. Just, sometimes, a deep breath must be taken. A whole new scene. So you go write a blog post instead. At least, that is what I do. Ha ha.

Really think about the term "revision." Re-vision. This is your chance to see if you've got everything running at full awesome. Don't be afraid to make drastic changes. I am not making drastic changes. Not now, but over the course of writing this book, there was much drastickness. Drasticity.

BE BRAVE!

On a happier note, a couple of things. First, Lips Touch is an honor book for the Oregon Spirit Book Award! This is awesome; it's an award given by the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, and I love English teachers!

Secondly, Lips Touch is up as the October title for Readergirlz! Thank you, Readergirlz! This is so cool. Check it out. There are guidelines for a book party, if you are inclined, including discussion questions, a play list, and recommendations for what kind of food to make, invitations, and even what movies to watch. This was SO FUN. The live chat will be October 20, if you want to put together a little gathering for that night. I'll be blogging more about it, of course. But go check it out :)

Let's Colour!

2010-09-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Steph for this awesome link in her comment to my last post. It was inspired by a combination of Morocco color + me having mentioned that I was revising to the music of Jonsi -- check out THIS:
Oh wow. This is SO my cup of tea! It is GLORIOUS. This project--the Let's Colour Project--paints neighborhoods around the world in vibrant color.

BRILLIANT!

After having seen the island of Burano, the lace-making island in the Venetian lagoon, and how it was COLOR that really made that place come alive (that, you know, plus being in the Venetian lagoon!). But check it out. The architecture itself is very plain. Imagine if these buildings were white or tan or grey, like so many houses in the US:

See what I mean?

So I've always thought it would be a great idea to pep up neighborhoods with rainbows of paint, and lo and behold, some mad geniuses have actually started to DO it. You can even get involved, which I assume would mean helping paint. And HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE???

Anyway, thank you Steph for the link!

And thank you Jonsi for the music :-)

I am dreaming a dreamy dream

2010-09-28T08:38:00.001-07:00

Photos pillaged from the internet.

Is it possible that one day in the not-too-distant future I might have my OWN dreamy-dream photos to post here?

:-)

The Winnowing of Post-its

2010-09-26T12:48:00.001-07:00

This is the look of my manuscript in revisions.

You may know: I love revisions. This is the part of writing my brain can really cuddle up to. The safe part? In Not For Robots I have this bushwhacking metaphor: writing first drafts with a machete; unexplored jungle! Dangers! Beasties! Excitement! Extending that metaphor, revisions are like building a snug cottage in that jungle and setting out tea saucers of little biscuits for the monkeys. All civilized, like.

Well. You know. No exactly like that. But kinda.

So. Here in a nutshell is my revision process. First thing I did was read and internalize my editor's letter, make notes on the main areas of work she proposed, and then set about reading my (hard copy) manuscript over with those things in mind. I marked it up liberally, and then, once that was done, I took it to the computer and input any "easy" changes, those things that can be fixed right there locally, within a line or two. The bigger things, ideas, themes, I asterisked and post-it'ed for later. Later being now.

The REAL work of revisions. Not the line edits, but the reconstruction, the deepening of significance, tightening of threads, clarifying of characterization, all that. So I've got this fat old book bristling with post-its of how to make it better, and I have to winnow down those post-its, one by one, until they're all gone. Winnow winnow. Once they're all gone, then I'll read the whole thing fresh for flow and to catch anything I might have missed, and to futz happily with language until I run out of time, then I'll send it on in to my lovely editor and see what she thinks.

After that? Another pass. And then? Copy edits. And then?

Whew. On it goes until the very sight of one's own book triggers the gag reflex. It's sad, but by the time the book is in print, the author has read it to death and probably won't be able to enjoy it again for like twenty years. But that does not mean that holding it in its actual bookness is not the hugest thrill ever, because it IS. Just please don't make us read it again! Ha ha.

Anyway. In revisions, you should have a clear picture of what it was you were trying to do with the book (a thing you might not entirely know until you've finished that first draft). And then hopefully you can read your manuscript with some objectivity and get a clear picture of what you have actually accomplished. So. What needs to be done to bring the actual up to the ideal? That's what revisions are about. Perfecting. Realizing the promise of your idea.

Gotta go now. Post-its beckon!

Do you love revisions? Not love? Tell me!

SPEAK UP

2010-09-23T09:29:00.001-07:00

Have you heard about the horrifyingly stupid op-ed piece by a university professor attempting to set in motion a ban Laurie Halse Anderson's book Speak? Lots of bloggers have been writing about this, and since I need to be revising right now, I will refer you to Stephanie's post about it. I hope you will check it out. Book banning is always a horror, and in this case, it is just so . . . so . . . evil, so evil-stupid, and such a perfect encapsulation of the horrors of censorship. I mean, the book is about finding one's voice to speak up about rape, and this idiot masquerading as an educator (shudder shudder) is trying to silence it and keep it out of the hands of the very victims who might be helped by it. AUGGGHHHHH!!!

Shannon Hale also blogged about it here, which is where I first heard about the controversy. There's an excerpt in her post from a reader about a library copy of Speak and its poignant last page that really testifies to the importance of this book.

Also, I saw in Stephanie's post that a school district has banned Sherman Alexi's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and I am reeling over that. National Book Award winner! Brilliant! Brilliant! On what grounds was it banned? It's not sexually explicit, and that's the usual culprit? Is it because of the alcoholism? Because oh sure, we shouldn't let young people read about the devastation of alcoholism.

Why, America? WHY?

On a much happier note, Clementine took her first steps yesterday, which was cute beyond cute. I could TELL she was ready, the way she was just standing there all steady. I KNEW if I coaxed her, she would walk, so I actually had to hold her off for a few minutes until Jim could get there, and then . . . she did it! Back and forth between us, four or five steps at a time, and then she would fling herself into our arms. So, she has to work on her landings :-) It's all geared toward the rushing leap right now, which is just fine. What's better than a baby hurling herself laughing into your arms?

What did I forget today?

2010-09-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Each morning when I'm leaving for the cafe to work (I'm currently alternating between two), I do a quick rundown of the stuff I need. Laptop, check. Manuscript (currently using hard copy for revisions, and that sucker is heavy to carry), check. Notebook, check. Phone, wallet, keys, umbrella, power cord. I think that's it. I frequently forget one of these things. Usually it's the wallet or the power cord, which was not a big deal when the cafe was so close to my house -- plus they knew me and would let me pay for my coffee the next day. Now I have to be more organized. I almost left without my wallet this morning, but remembered at the door (it was on the floor where *somebody* had been playing with it, picking at its felt flower), and felt all smug. Ha.

So what's missing, now that I'm here? A tiny thing. Two tiny things: the little rubber covers of my ear buds! *Somebody* has newly started to pick them off while pursuing her favorite hobby of emptying my purse out item by item, so I had to put them out of her reach so she didn't, you know, eat them. And they remain out of reach. Joke's on me.

What I've learned from this is that you can still wear ear buds without the covers, but they don't block out ambient noise anymore. And that's kind of the whole point. So drat and blast.

Anyway. This next part here is probably obnoxious, but I can't help myself. In response to my last post (which was not, I swear, a desperate plea for praise!), young reader Katherine sent me a wonderful email, and I am not going to get in the habit of preening over praise emails here, but I can't help it this time. Here it is:

Hi Laini!!!
I was reading your blog and heard you needed encouragement!!! (Prepare yourself, for I shall be ranting about how much I love your characters..)

I'm 14. I read a LLOOOOOTT of books, on average, 2 books a week. And I can say with complete certainty that your books are my favorite and you are MOST DEFINITELY my favorite author. None of the others even come CLOSE.
I LOOOOOVE YOUR CHARACTERS!!!!! Specially Magpie :D and I was actually telling my friend the other day how cute Hirik and Whisper were as a couple!!!!! :D :D :D :D :D (*fangirl squeal*)
And it's not just your characters I love. The way you write it??? So much beautiful detail, the perfect combination of adventure, love, magic, sadness/heartbreak, anger, fantasy, everything!!! I love it all and you balance it all perfectly.
And also, your ideas are so original. SHEER GENIUS. The tapestry, the Djinns, and the one I thought was the coolest? Silksingers. I never would ever have thought of that and I don't know anyone who could. Spinning magic carpets with their voices!!! I'm a singer, so I probably got more excited about it than most would, but STILL....wow. Just wow.

On a completely unrelated note, you're so funny as a person :D not funny as in, laughing at you but as in your jokes are HILARIOUS :D
And I remember reading one of your old short stories about a ghost girl who put beetles in matchboxes with jewels and pretended they were robbing banks...... that made me laugh so hard and I loved it so much!!!

Anyways, I just wanted to say you are my idol and don't feel down. And just know that your characters are pure genius and you should never think otherwise.

Love,
Kat

Oh man, thanks Kat. That email made my entire head smile. You should have seen it. My big smiling head :-) Thank you. I love getting emails from readers. In the three years since my first book was published, the amazement has not diminished one bit that there are people out there with my books in their hands and what's more they like them. This is the coolest thing ever, and every day I am grateful I went for it, this dream, that has made my life so rich and fun.

Also, I love Kat's note because it affirms for me that my books do what I hope they do (for some readers, at least), and that they are the kind of books I want to write -- the kind *I* want to read, the kind I want to live in.

So, HUGE THANK YOU to Katherine. Yay!!!

*grin grin grin* *whole head still smiling*

Oh. And this is SO COOL. I will be reminding you in the upcoming days and weeks. The awesome divas at Readergirlz are featuring Lips Touch as their October title!!!! I don't know any online book community that can match Readergirlz for awesome, and I am thrilled to be part of it. There will be a live chat on October 20, about which I will remind you, but in the meantime they will post cool stuff, and ... stuff. Stuff is going to happen. Stay tuned!

Writers Need Cheerleaders

2010-09-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Writers need different things from different people. They need feedback, help, snack-making, coffee-pouring, advice, editing, encouragement, encouragement, encouragement, enthusiasm, encouragement, and encouragement.

Writers need cheerleaders. Before feedback. Before editing. Before almost anything else but snack-making, we need to be convinced and reminded that we are GOOD. Feedback of the critical sort, however constructive and wise, can be deadly if it comes too soon. Possibly the most important person in our community, is our cheerleader. Do you have one? Several? Have at least one.

And no. You can not be your own cheerleader. At least, not your only one.

Here is how it goes:

In the beginning of working on a novel, everything shimmers with your genius. The newness, the never-beforeness, the unmitigated awesome, it cannot be repressed. You do not need a cheerleader yet. Just work. Enjoy this time, because it will not last.

It gets harder. You keep working. It is not as delightful to draw up your chair each day and get started. You think wistfully of the wonderful, uncomplicated dishes that need to be washed. And did you once think that character was so unique? Whatever made you think that? Delusional.

Wow. This theme is so tired. Will anyone care? I barely care anymore. And this scene seemed so cool the first twelve times I rewrote it. Have I killed it? Or is it just in a coma? Or am I in a coma? Huh. What is a coma? I think I'll google it and learn all about comas today . . .

--Paging cheerleader.--

There comes a time when you cannot summon even the phantom of the enthusiasm you once had for your great idea. You have to trust that you had it, and that is was genuine and deserved. I actually recommend making a list, while you are still in the throes of passionate love with your incipient book, of all the things you love about your idea. Be detailed. Later you can look at it and trust that you knew what you were talking about. This helps a little, but there is nothing that I have discovered that can rejuvenate your enthusiasm like wild and heartfelt PRAISE.

I think every writer I know has this wish at some point: that they could temporarily wipe their brain clean of their book and read it fresh, like a reader. We can't, of course, be we can experience that vicariously through our first readers, or as I have heard them called lately, "beta readers." It might work for you to wait until you have a finished draft. I usually need propping up well before then, and will give over chunks of partial book. I am blessed with a few wonderfully gifted praise-givers, without whom I am certain I would never finish anything. My wonderful husband Jim gives great praise, as does my best friend Alexandra, who gives only praise, and no criticism -- and she is not withholding anything, she is just an enthusiastic reader with a very generous heart and open mind, and she has revived my flagging spirits and brain so many times, like injections of writing adrenalin right to my heart, Pulp Fiction style. Stephanie Perkins is also an amazing reader, both for praise-giving and, later, for feedback. Thanks, guys!

If you don't have a cheerleader, get one. You cannot trust yourself to see your book clearly when you have been deep inside it for a long time. You are not to be trusted.

Do you have a cheerleader? And how about this: are YOU somebody's cheerleader? When a friend gives you something to read, consider carefully what they need at that moment. It might be that they need critical feedback, but maybe they aren't ready for it yet. They might know themselves well enough to tell you exactly what they need, and they might not. Do not ever be the one to kill someone's book by giving them critical feedback too soon. Bite your tongue. Nurture. Cheer. Drop off snacks. Rave. And be specific. Writers love to know which parts you liked, what made you laugh or cry or shout, "No!" in nail-biting dread, what parts were really smart or compelling or original. Just the good stuff, mind.

Rah rah!

Oh, and, awesome: Lips Touch made Booklist's Top 10 Romance Fiction for Youth 2010 list! *thrill thrill thrill* !!!!! Here is the fabulous list, with a bunch of mouth-watering books on it.

Acceptable Destruction, or: the Calculus of Mess

2010-09-14T08:48:00.001-07:00

Wow. I think I've forgotten how to blog. And I miss it! I've been trying to write a catch-up post for the past week. There are several saved versions in my blogger archive that I poked away at but that never coalesced -- in my deadline addled brain -- into any kind of sense. So. No guarantees here, either.

The monumentalness (monumentality, if you want to be strict about it) of having finished the book has given way to a feeling of weightlessness. Floating. The book is not in my head any more. It is not even just in my computer any more. It is on paper, fatly bound at Kinko's into proto-bookness, and it has also zipped through the ether to various large cities -- New York, London, Los Angeles. Weaverville, North Carolina, ha ha. It exists in the world in its unpolished state. Up next: polishing. Which is a job that I relish. I have a polisher's heart. I love to tinker. Bring on the tinkering! And if there are changes and fixes too big to be called tinkering, that's okay too. I love all of revision. (But ask me about it in late October and we'll see how I feel then.)

(To Katie, who enquired if this was yet another book after Daughter of Smoke and Bone: no. This was that book. Next up = the sequel! Actually, next up, today, is polishing a script to an illustrated project for younger readers that Jim and I have in the works. I wrote it last fall with a sleeping newborn in my lap and it has had a fairly interesting life so far, taken a number of journeys, lived temporarily in a number of houses, and now it is home like a college kid with a duffel bag full of laundry, soon to be sent on its way again :-)

So. Today I am auditioning a new writing cafe. Because of this tragedy:
Boo hoo hoo! My cafe closed. Three days after I finished the book! Isn't that eerie? I have this crazy idea that it is a drifting cafe of the mind (like the Treehouse of the Mind in Horns) that is there when you most need it. Right now, it is opening its doors in some little corner of Cincinnati or Boise or Sassafras (come on, there is probably a town in the US called Sassafras) where someone is in need of a quiet place to write.

To that person, I say: Give it back. It's mine.

Boo hoo hoo!

This new cafe is bigger and shinier, and not too busy or noisy, but a) the service wasn't friendly, and b) it's a 17-minute walk from my house, versus three. Which will be exceedingly unpleasant in the coming rains. I actually liked my three-minute umbrella walks to my old cafe, but I think the fun would wear off somewhere around minute five or six. I could (and probably will) get a bike, but then there's the whole glasses-in-the-rain thing. I never wear my contacts for staring at words. Ouchy.

There is another cafe closer to home, maybe ten minutes walk, but it is really busy and noisy and also so full of delicious baked goodness that I would ... increase ... if I went there every day. It's possible that I would prove powerless against coffee cake. Like, yesterday: I woke up from an afternoon nap filled with the pure conviction that if I didn't have cake immediately, I would die. Luckily, there was cake at hand, and so I live on.

Oh sigh. I may have to revert to my writing room for winter, and just barricade the door against cuteness and plug in my earbuds and pretend I'm in a cafe. It'll be cheaper. Plus, my writing room is awesome! I miss it! I am reminded of its awesomeness after having finally, totally belatedly, cleaned it to photograph it for inclusion in an upcoming studios issue of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine (love love love that magazine). Ah, cleaning with a one-year-old is so. Much. Fun. You know it is. Ever since Clementine became mobile, we have been learning what I'm sure all parents everywhere know, and it is this thing I'll call "acceptable destruction." I'll give you an example:

If Clementine is kept occupied for two full minutes by shredding a roll of toilet paper, and I am able in that time to brush my teeth and put my contacts in and maybe even apply mascara, is the resulting destruction acceptable or does it cross the line into being more hassle than those two minutes were worth? It's a careful and constantly evolving calculus of mess. It is amazing what comes to seem "acceptable." Such as: "Hm, it looks like letting Clementine destroy my brand-new crocheted flower paper clips from Anthropologie is going to buy me three minutes. Well. They were only $10." (And yes, I was watching to make sure she did not ingest any paper clips! I admit, though, she finds things. Like the other day, she was innocuously playing with a stuffed animal she had pulled off the shelf, and I looked up to find she had undone the pin it was wearing and had stretched back the needle-sharp pokey part like a ... hideous stabbing instrument ... and was looking at me kind of like, "Dude, you're letting me play with this?" )

Yikes.

(And as for the paper clips, I was going to take the flowers off anyway and sew them onto barrettes because really: who needs crocheted flowers on their paper clips?)

So. I don't have any photos of the real mess-making, but here is Clementine in various ways helping put the finishing touches on the room:
These books are for me, right? I mean, why else would you stack them under the bench? (Doy.)

Hey look, this stuffed animal is wearing a giant stabby pin too! (Hazards abound!)

Did you know there are a ton more books back here? Score!

Oh, I'm sure this post-it isn't marking anything important here. I'll just have this, thanks ...

What? I'm helping.

My work here is done. I'm off to climb the stairs now! Bye!

And of course, I can't neglect to show you this:
First, look at that keyboard! I have worn that thing out, which makes me weirdly proud. But the missing "m" is not my doing. How easily it disengaged, with the littlest "snick" sound. She reached right for it, like she wanted that one.

Okay. The secret truth is: this is all really really fun. Clementine is getting more fun every day -- that's what everyone says, and it's true. At this rate, when does your head just explode from overload? Or do we just have an infinite capacity for cuteness tolerance? I don't know.
Hey, I'm taller than you now, devil girl!

Where can I get some horns like that?

Uh, mommy, why's this door closed ... ?

I'm going to try to be an actual blogger again, because I really miss it! Don't give up on me! I'm still heeeeeeeeeere ...

There.

2010-09-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

*dusts off hands*

I have finished my new book. It is done. For at least the next three days, because as you know, a book isn't "done" until someone pries it out of your hands and publishes it.

I am not feeling up to conveying the wonder of finishing a book. Tired. Happy. Tired. Happy. Going to bed.

Mwah. Goodnight.

Project

2010-08-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

Oh yes. My, my yes.
Thank you to the brilliant Levni Yilmaz for summing it all up, and to Patrick Rothfuss for posting it, and Stephanie Perkins for sending me the link. That is a lovely chain of brilliant: Levni Yilmaz, and two of my favorite writers, Patrick Rothfuss and Stephanie Perkins ;-)

By the way, Pat had a FABULOUS post on revision lately, in which he tries to explain, at the request of a non-writer, just what exactly it is we writers DO when we are "revising." So good. So so good. As much of a pain as revising can be, I am YEARNING to be there. There is little that I can think of (in the realm of work, that is) as pleasurable as sitting down with a big fat freshly printed manuscript, a new pack of post-its, and a good pen. Oh, the love, the love. And I am nearly there. Salty tears of joy, my friends, are soon to be streaming down my face. But now, I am still something like the above video.

Yesterday was not the most productive of days. It was more of a getting lost in my own storytelling day, trying to get some things to come together just right and feel like they happened that way inevitably, elegantly, like nothing else could possibly have happened but that. (That is the trick, because, you know, at any moment in writing a story, literally anything could happen, and choosing the thing that does happen and making it seem REAL, that is a big part of this gig. So. I am still working this particular thing out. I'm getting it. Yesterday it felt kind of like I had just dropped a handful of pickup sticks and was staring at them in dismay, knowing I needed to get down on my knees and start gathering them up again, but, you know, not wanting to. You just have to do it.)

Anyway. What should I NOT be doing?
a) watching videos.
b) blogging videos.

(Thanks a lot, Steph. No really: thanks. That was awesome. Steph, by the way, is blogging every day right now, which is not easy. Go cheer her on!)

Upside-Downside

2010-08-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Upside:

A really solid writing day! The end of the book so close I can taste it. A self high-five for a bad-assitude at the close of a chapter. Yay!

As a bonus, baby falls asleep in car on the way home from parents', who have babysat and fed us so I could squeeze in another precious writing hour. I have it made, I think: sleeping baby at 7:30, without having to even try.

Ahem.

Downside:

Baby wakes up and stays up. Resists all tricks and efforts and sleep-induction. Husband not home. Baby wide awake. Book not getting finished.

More coffee is consumed against the certainty of a post-midnight workday extension.

Baby still awake at 10 pm; husband still not home to take over. I decide I might as well put the dishes away while baby plays. Something catches my eye just as I'm sliding a bowl into a stack of heirloom Italian ceramics on a tiptoe shelf. I drop the stack, terrify the baby, and break almost every dish. (Mom, if you're reading this, breathe.)

Comfort scared baby, who decides it's high time to fall asleep. About five-minutes post-disaster. Of course. Husband returns home two minutes after that, finds the cataclysm, wonders what happened.

Razzle fratzen.

hello!

2010-08-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

Hi! I miss you, blog people! I am living in the shadow of a deadline right now (eeeep!) but I will return. Possibly very soon. Likely very soon. Certainly very soon.

Cheers!

Happy Birthday, Clementine Pie!

2010-08-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

One year ago today:
And now:

We love you so much, our little pie. Thank you for a beautiful year, and many more to come.

We never knew that babies were so

a) easy
b) fun

Really and truly. At least, you are.

(More later. xo)

Harried check-in

2010-08-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

Blog? I have a blog? Oh yeah :-) Little check-in here. I have been writing away, and there's not much to say about that but things I've muttered in tweet-form, such as how the story stretches ahead of me, seeming to grow, the way the horizon recedes in dream sequences and you can keep running and running and never get there, ha ha. But I'm not discouraged. I'm totally moving through narrative, it's just that the more it develops, the more there is to write! Still on track for my deadline, though. Whew!

Also, Clementine turns one a week from yesterday! Wowza! Thinking how to celebrate it in some mild way, with a minimum of presents, and a small number of people so she doesn't get too shy or overwhelmed. I'm excited. I have plans for a trunk of "artifacts" I want to collect for her for each year of her life, starting with, this year: her tiniest first onesie and pair of hand-knit booties (with pictures of her wearing them). I want to get some kind of cool antique chest to keep it all in (each year in its own little box inside), but I may hold off on that because it is looking likely that Jim and Clementine and I will be heading to ... and exotic location ... in the next few months, an exotic location known for its shopping, I might add. Not that that appeals to me, ahem. It's not for sure; I haven't planned a trip overseas in quite a while. When you haven't done it in a long time, it gets to seeming really insurmountable and improbable, as if you could just ... fly away to, say, India, or North Africa. Like: who does that? But then you do it, and you see: it's easy! (Well, so long as you can afford the freaking airfare.) So I'm just going to say here: we are GOING. Definitely. To an exotic place that shall remain nameless. Within a few months.

Anyway, the trunk of "artifacts." Along with letters to her, to read when she's grown up. I think it could be lovely. If/when I manage it, I'll post photos, of course! Gift-wise for now, I'm not big on oodles of presents for wee ones, but we have gotten her one of her favorite books (Homemade Love, by Bell Hooks) that so far we've had on a kind of permanent loan from the library. (The library can finally get their book back!) and one paperback that has been destroyed by love, in a more durable hardcover edition (Duck on a Bike, by David Shannon). I suppose some sort of toy will also make an appearance, but that's probably all. Someone suggested: wrap up a couple of her favorite things. It's not like she knows, and there's something so dispiriting about watching young children rip open gifts and toss them aside, isn't there?

I think my teenage niece and her friends are going to play guitar for us and sing and do some Polynesian dances, so that will be fun!

Anyway, I am perched in my cafe now, and I am on the brink of a Major Thing Happening in the story, so sayonara, Mrs. Kackleman!

Clementine's First Trip to the Beach!

2010-07-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't been in the circumstances to be a "beach person" in so long it's easy to forget how very very much I am one. Really. I just love the beach. I was blessed with a beach childhood. As a Navy brat, the beach was never far. I was shoveling Hawaiian sand into my mouth before I could walk, or so I'm told, and after that was the Atlantic in Virginia, which I remember as monotonously same and without landmarks (not that I cared as a kid), and really really crowded.

Then, score: four years of perfect childhood summers (and all seasons, really) in Southern Italy, living two blocks from Serapo Beach in Gaeta, about an hour north of Naples. Every day at the beach. Every every every day. And yes, these were the '80s and yes, there were whispers even then about the sun not being "healthy" but whatever -- who could believe it? I was a brown berry of a child. The sea was warm, the Italians were wonderful, some parent or other could usually be counted on to spring for a peddleboat and if not, heck, there were cliffs to climb, grottos to explore, islands to swim to, castles to build, gelato to eat. Idyllic and perfect. My next beach? Not so much. Oostend, on Belgium's North Sea coast. North Sea? Not the Mediterranean. Moving on. High school beach: Huntington and Newport in southern California. Not my favorite, but you know. It did the trick, and had cute life guards, which let's be honest is a large part of what high school girls look for in a beach.

In college and came the shift to cold oceans where the coastal landscapes (Northern California and now the Pacific Northwest) became very beautiful . . . and very cold and very windy. I stress the beautiful part, but you know, that's not all it's about. The endless lolling, the sand-encrustation of childhood, swimming for hours and hours, drying salty, all that stuff, it's of the distant past, and I miss it. And I want Clementine (and hopeful future sibling) to have it, though with much much more sunblock. And doofy wide-brimmed hats they will complain about.

I didn't mean to go on about that. It's funny though, how easy it is to mislay a part of yourself. My beach self has been in a little box for years, and she's yammering for release. Mexico? Italy? I don't know. When? Not this summer, I guess. Maybe next. At least we got to the coast on a beautiful weekend, though it was far too short!

Our favorite beach town is Manzanita, about an hour and a half from Portland. Just north of it, in Oswald West State Park, is this lovely little beach, I think it's called Short Sands:

Clementine's first encounter with sand was not love-at-first-sight! It clung to her toes and fingers and it distressed her, that she couldn't wipe it off. She was not a fan, and stayed firmly planted on the safety of the beach blanket!

The next day, however, we spent a long loll at Nehalem Bay State Park, on the bay side (it's a sandspit with ocean beach on one side and lovely lovely river mouth on the other) and she got over her aversion in a big way. This little beach (accessed off the boat ramp parking, if you're going there) is one of our favorite spots: it's an alien driftwood landscape with a gentle shore, dunes on the far end, kayakers gliding past, and the town of Wheeler far across the water. Once we got Clementine set up with buckets of water and toys and holes to dig, she was entranced. It was so incredibly adorable that I forgot to take photos. Here we are, though:

And here's what it looks like in Wheeler, on the other side of the bay:

(I did a more travelogue kind of post of this same stretch of coast a few years ago -- check it out, me pre-pink!)
All the playing really tired the little muppet out, and at 6:30 on Manzanita beach, before we could even have a bath, conk! Out like a light for 13 hours!

Funny how carrying a baby has cut back my non-baby photography. All my pictures of this trip were of my sweeties! Or taken by Jim of his sweeties. Anyway, it was a lovely little get-away, but I'm still totally jonesing for a REAL BEACH VACATION. Though I can tell you right now, Jim, my love, ideal partner in all other things, is not probably going to be the ideal partner in a lolly beach vacation. Six years post-melanoma, he is understandably a bit freaked by the sun. Creamy little Clementine Pie has a life of icky sticky ooey gooey sunblock ahead of her, as it must be. I just wish sunblock wasn't so . . . so . . . you know. So icky. (Speaking of which, recent reports on how sunscreen is, amazingly, not regulated! There is super crappy stuff in it, including estrogen, so consumer beware! Especially for your babies, try to seek out the natural stuff. It's $$, but hell. Who wants to slather their baby with hormones???)

Okay, that's all. Cheers!

Favorite beach getaways, anyone? Dream beach getaways?

Vampire Happiness

2010-07-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, so tell me how weird this is. Jim and Clementine and I were away for the weekend at the Oregon coast, lovely lovely, more on that later, but anyway, we were in one of those crap beach shops that all sell the same schmaltz, and walked past a little shelf of tchotchkes, you know, little figurines with sayings on them, super tacky? And Jim pointed at one and said, "How funny. For some reason when I first glanced at that, I thought it said ..."

And as he began to speak, I glanced at the tchotchke in question, and I don't even remember what particular tackiness it was, a unicorn or a girl or whatever, but it had a little banner unfurled across the front (all ceramic) with a single word on it, and AS Jim was speaking, I glanced at it and thought for a split second that it said, "Vampire."

And then -- then -- Jim finished his thought, which was, " ... I thought it said 'vampire.'"

In fact, it said in plain block letters: HAPPINESS.

So I ask you, why -- why? -- did we BOTH, independently of one another, misread it to say "vampire"? Vampire looks nothing like happiness. Happiness looks nothing like vampire. I cannot explain it. Our brains are one.

Jim did say, and I have to agree, that if it had said "vampire" he would have bought it.

Ha ha!

Hope you had a lovely weekend too. I'll be back with Clementine beach pics! It was her FIRST TRIP TO THE BEACH and it was suitably adorable :-)

A guest post about cheese, with a little bit of France thrown in

2010-07-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

As promised, here we have a guest post by my marvelous best friend, Alexandra, who went to France recently, and ate a lot of cheese! I think it might be my fault, as I texted her relentlessly with commands to "eat cheese for me today," which is what I say whenever anyone goes to France. Can we all just take a moment to sit dreamily in honor of cheese? (a favorite quote: "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." -GK Chesterton) And the last thing I'll say about cheese, before turning you over to Alexandra, is this: one of the highlights of being pregnant was a feeling of perfect entitlement to eat cheese! And now, without further ado ... Alexandra!

I read that Winston Churhcill said of France in 1940, “A country producing almost 360 different kinds of cheese cannot die!” Before my trip, such a statement would have meant 100% nothing to me. I even spent two years in Bulgaria, otherwise known as “the land of only two cheeses,” and my tongue never batted a flick. Yes, I've lived a nearly cheeseless existence for 38 years until last month when, while in my third day in Paris, walking along one of those narrow cobblestoned alleys strumming the Seine, I heard wheels of cheese sing out to ME. And just like that, wherever I went throughout France for the next thirteen days, all I had to do was open my mouth and wheels of cheese rolled themselves right in!

Munster, Roquefort, Tomme de Savoie, Explorateur, Gaperon, *sigh*.....I believe I was eventually welcomed by all eight of the cheese family dynasties, and each of their distinguished relatives seemed to take to me immediately. All I have to say is God bless every single morsel of cheese in France, and every last stinky fromagerie within its borders.

(My only cheese-related regret is that I didn’t have a spare pair of buttocks that could metabolize les fromages without any evidential trace of its consumption. Unfortunately, it looks like those will have to wait, along with my other dream of detachable limbs you can drop off at pilates on your way to work and pick them up at the end of the day.)

But of course thats not all there is to France! You already know that you can find the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, croissants, and pain du chocolat here too, but no one ever mentioned to me the wild boars everywhere muscling their tusks through the Saint Germaine quarter with all their overflowing shopping bags, midnight open air markets selling dried fruits and teas and lavendar alongside aerial gondola expeditions that will have you to Tanzania and back by sunrise, bath oils produced by local Mediterranean mermaids, and very lively crepe eating competitions for reptilain vultures of all sorts. Who knew that bats could devour so many Nutella smothered crepes so very quickly? Not to mention the hippie ostriches selling their beautiful oil paintings of French countryside life.

[ed note: I want to go to that France! Is there a special airline? A crack in a wall somewhere that takes you there?]

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to replicate some of my finest cheese moments, and I leave you with my favorite, which can be made easy enough whether or not you like to cook. It comes very close to something I ate in Avignon. The only difference is that there it was served with literally a carpet of cheese about half an inch thick- and unless you have ample calories to spare or like to feel like you are eating a tundra of cheese, I prefer to spread the cheese only about three ants high instead -- and its still very tasty! The only other difference I notice is that the goat cheese in France smelled much more “goaty” than any I buy here. Its almost as if the goat cheese that you buy in the U.S. has been forced to shower!

Alexandra’s Very Easy & Tasty Sandwich Recipe
Serves 4 Adults with a Regular Appetite or Laini at dinnertime [ed. note. Hey!]

All you Need Are:

2 Baguettes
2 Red Peppers
2 Yellow Peppers
2 Sweet Onions
Goat Cheese - but preferably not the sort you squeeze out like toothpaste

Preheat oven to 350.

Cut each baguette in half, or in thirds. Then slice them in the middle using your knife- or you can do what I do which is just pry them gently apart with your fingers. I like the more ‘tousled’ bread look better myself!

Next, slice your peppers and onions in two and three inch long strips. Saute in olive oil.

Meanwhile, don’t forget about the bread! Place them in the center of your oven with or without a baking sheet for 5-7 minutes, or until toasty and a tiny bit crunchy. I like to turn the bread over for the last two minutes but sometimes I forget and its no biggie.

Now the bread, peppers, and onions should be all finished and temporarily placed aside because really they only play second fiddle roles as the headliner will always, always, and always be....the goat cheese, showered or not. Turn on the French national anthem as you take out your finest knife and proceed to spread a nice layer of cheese across each open faced slice, and only then, after each last teensy weensy part of the cheese has taken its place on stage, then you can bring out the supporting cast and arrange your sauteed veggies on top. Eat while warm with the anthem playing on loop.

Moving on, I come from a family in which I have been conditioned and am now unable to sleep past 7 am most mornings. My father revealed to me recently that on long road trips growing up, after we had all fallen asleep in our hotel beds, he would quietly set all the alarm clocks one to two hours ahead so that we could be up and out as early as possible. The upside of this years later is that one of my favorite things to do when traveling is to meet the city at the break of dawn when most of its inhabitants, and all of its tourists, are still snoozing. You see things you wouldn’t otherwise -- the way the sunlight skims and tickles the horizon and rooftops out of its slumber, the smell of baking croissants wafting out the backdoors of bakeries left open, and farmers pulling their vehicles into open market stalls as they unload cherries, melons, tomatoes, lettuce, among other edibles. I watched in Nice as two men, both with soccer ball bellies, tossed heads of lettuce to each other from the car to the stall’s tables, laughing and teasing as they did so. There is a crispness to early morning air that hasn’t yet been trampled by the breaths and banter of bankers and bakers on their way to work, mothers with crabby toddlers in tow, oblivious teens who bump into you as they text, not to mention an absence of honking cars, radios, sirens, and other miscellaneous human murmurs and yelps. The city seems to perch on your palm, and beckon to be explored alone.

One morning I was the first to arrive at a cafe in the Provencal town of Avignon. The waitor asked what I was reading and when I told him The Bread of Angels by Stephanie Saldana, he asked me what it was about. I explained that it is an autobiographical account of Saldana’s year living in Syria as a Fullbright scholar at the height of our war with Iraq. A Catholic from Texas, she was there to study the portrayal of Jesus in the Koran. It is also very much about the Syrians she comes to befriend and provides a very much-needed human face on the people of Syria as individuals at a time when our government was giving them the not-so-distinct honor as a member of the “Axis of Evil.” Because I was the only one there, he was able to sit down and tell me his own experience of being Muslim in France. “When I’m in France,” he explained to me, “I’m not really considered French though I was born here. But when I worked in England, I was. I’m French everywhere but in my own homeland. Because I’m a Muslim, because I’m an Arab.” This same sentiment was expressed to me by a college student, Naouel, whom I traveled with by train from Avignon to Nice. She wore a beautiful silk orange headwrap. I asked her what she thought about Chirac’s efforts to make wearing the headdress out in public illegal. Her eyes welled up and she shook her head. Then she said, “It will not change anything if it happens. What needs to change, to open, is the human heart.”

I met Mormon boys on two year missions in France, a Croatian couple who gave me the rundown on the last 25 years of their lives in broken English, an aspiring Mexican filmmaker, Rafael, who spent two great hours describing to me in amazing detail his month spent on El Camino De Santiago with his father, wonderful cousins I had never met before, and a once famous and now retired actor from Algeria while sipping tea in Le Mosque patissierie which is a part of the oldest mosque in Paris.

And of course thats the best part of traveling, that one meets so many people you would otherwise never cross paths with. We discover new parts of ourselves in places we have never been as we set eyes on new sights, taste new flavors, and are exposed to different ways of seeing and being in the world than our own narrow conditioning has often allowed.

More pictures at the Mosque de Paris:

If you’re planning to go to France, here is a wrap-up of things that I would highly recommend and that were the definite most favorite moments.

1) ANNECY

Annecy is a small town in the Alps that offers the best bike ride I have ever taken in my life. You can bike for miles and miles on a relatively flat path along the lake, surrounded entirely by the Alps, as you whiz by tiny villages and cathedrals. Bring a sandwich with you, and a huge bag of cherries naturally, and have a picnic after a few hours in any of the sweet tiny lakeside parks along the way. Annecy itself couldn’t be any more idyllic with its medieval center filled with flower-lined canals, cobblestoned streets, and the best apricot and coconut sorbet known to mankind. An old 12th-century prison jettisons out at one juncture right over one of the central townsquare canals. I would love to have spent a whole summer here eating ice-cream, going for local hikes, renting paddle boats and reading out in the middle of the lake, and strolling through the daily early morning open market that stretches right over one of the canal bridges.

2) CHAGALL MUSEUM

Chagall is one of my all-time favorite painters and his prints, along with Laini’s, make up the bulk of art on my walls both at home and office. Nonetheless, I wasn’t initially super excited to see the Chagall museum down in Nice because I knew it was comprised primarily of his biblical scenes which have never interested me nearly as much as his paintings of Russian or Parisian life. All that changed the moment I entered the surprisingly small but beautiful museum. The works are huge and displayed in a white gallery that is flooded with just enough natural light to illuminate each painting’s vibrant details perfectly. Each one was filled with so many details I had never picked up seeing in a book or even a poster. There is also a great little garden cafe outside that was a great spot to read and journal in.

3) ROTHSCHILD VILLA

I came back a second day just to write and draw here. The Rothschild villa took five years to build, and is a flamingo pink extravaganza with an enormous garden in the shape of a ship’s bow. In addition to that garden, there are five others, with my favorite being the Spanish Garden. I really like the Baronness’s sense of practicality too. While she already had four villas in the rather near vicinities, one can never have enough villas. Isn’t it weird to think of having so much money that you could build a villa the way children build houses out of Legos? [ed. note: what's weird about that? Doesn't everyone do that?] I read that when she lived there until her death in the 1930s she made all the gardeners dress like sailors and liked to dress as Marie Antoinette when having guests over. The villa overlooks the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the French Riviera, and is an easy 20-minute bus ride from Nice.

4) ICE CREAM

This isn’t a spot so much as a suggestion. I kept a gelato ratings page in my journal so I could be sure to track my favorite flavors. Plus time was short and I wanted to be sure to try as many kinds as possible, and avoid revisiting any of the more mediocre flavors accidentally. Focus and planning is very important with so many flavors to cover. The top three star ratings went to cocco, stracciatella, bacio, pistaccio integrale, amarena, and nocciola piemonte!

Maya Angelou said somewhere that “Every child should have traveling shoes.” I’d add to that “every adult too.” I came back from this trip reinspired to work on my second draft of my novel after feeling rather stagnant the last few months. I come back feeling grateful for my family of dear friends and of course, a new appreciation for cheese. I also came back with a reassembled list of priorities and goals. Great travel does that, and while its fun to have new adventures far from home, my favorite part I think may always be the new miles it allows us to travel inwardly, infusing the soul with courage and desire to have more adventures right here on our own home turf and in our very own sweet hearts. [ed. note: yeah yeah yeah. And the cheese!]

Japanese zombie baseball? Plus, some thoughts on writing productivity

2010-07-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Because why not?

Ha ha, here's the synopsis:

"Battlefield Baseball is a tough game--it doesn't end until all the members on the opposing team are dead. In this game the Gedo High team is composed of blue-faced zombies, and their opponents on the Seido High team know they don't have a chance at beating them unless they can bring back a star pitcher who has a lethal pitch called the Super Tornado, but who has hung up his cleats and has no desire to return to the game."

(I just spelled "small" "snakk." Kind of a cute word. I've always thought "Snack" would be an excellent name for a small dog, don't you agree? And maybe you could spell it Snakk and say it means something on the dog's planet, like Valiant Warrior or Pontius Pilate or something.)

Monday morning, just got to the cafe, and I am going to set Freedom* asap and get to it. (Right after this blogging interlude, snarf snarf.) I've had a string of awesome writing mornings, I'm really in a groove and it is a wonderful wonderful feeling. I am not even afraid of my deadline right now, not even a little. Just super excited! Of course, as we all know, these things turn on a dime. Fingers crossed for this stretch to continue. Two things:

-- Writing every day. Every day. Every every day. First time I've pulled off this stunt in a long while, and I owe it to my wonderful husband who gets up at 4 am every morning so he can get a little work done before taking Clementine from 8 to 1, so I can write. Also, he's been doing 90% of the stuff around the house lately (he might amend that to 99%). Mwah, sweetie. Thank you.

-- Before Clementine was born, I heard this rumor that when you have less time, you get more productive with it. I am at last learning how to make that true. See, it's not one of those things that is just instantly true. It doesn't happen that you magically wake up more productive.You have to work at it, but desperation can be the mother of productivity, ha ha. I have to say that my 4-5 hours now are more productive than many of my childless 12-hour work stretches used to be.

That is all. Beware zombie baseball players. Ouch.

* too lazy to link: Freedom is an application (for Macs) that disables your wireless for a specified period of time so you can't get online and distract yourself. Some days I really really need it. Thank you, Freedom!

thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill (another book announcement!)

2010-07-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

I hinted recently at more unfolding wonderfulness, and here it is! Daughter of Smoke and Bone has sold UK/Commonwealth rights to the AMAZING Kate Howard at the AMAZING Hodder & Stoughton, who have totally rocked my world. I'm such a goob about all things business, that it didn't totally register with me that my wonderful agent, Jane Putch, had held onto UK rights (psst, writers, in the "to agent or not to agent" question, I come down firmly on the "agent" side!), but man, I'm so glad she did. The experience so far with H&S has been Awesome Part II, following on the heels of the overflowing Awesome that is Little, Brown.

Today H&S's announcement came out at thebookseller.com:

H&S acquires hot trio by Laini Taylor
16.07.10 | Catherine Neilan

Hodder & Stoughton has bought a "hotly pursued crossover novel", tentatively entitled, Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor.

Encouraged by "extraordinary levels of excitement" from within Hodder, Kate Howard, senior editor, flew out to Los Angeles to meet agent Jane Putch, president of Eyebait Licensing, to win the book. Howard took a number of items relating to the story—a jar filled with paper wishes from Hodder staff, a wishbone necklace and a large sketch book detailing the publishing strategy—in support of her bid and secured British Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to three novels altogether. She said she was "over the moon to be the UK editor for her books".

Howard added: "Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a magnificent book, which grabbed me from the opening page, and had everyone at Hodder completely enthralled. The book’s macabre fairytale feel is incredibly inventive and original, and the fantasy is wonderfully creative yet extremely accessible.

"I felt the same way about it as I felt when I read His Dark Materials and Twilight—that shiver of excitement knowing I was reading something outstanding. It’s a brilliant novel, with a feisty heroine who I know will resonate with readers young and old, male and female."

Putch said: "Hodder, Kate Howard and the entire acquisition team simply bowled us over. After the remarkable, savvy and thoughtful presentation, we knew we had found the right home."

Taylor has written three previous books, the most recent of which, Lips Touch: Three Times, was a silver medal finalist for the 2009 National Book Award.

Hodder will publish in hardcover next autumn and will support the launch with "a large-scale, sustained and innovative consumer campaign".

Little, Brown Young Readers US also fought off "stiff competition", winning the novel at auction. It will be published with a big launch next autumn.

* * *

There is so much to look forward to in the next couple of years, it's kind of overwhelming. I said before this is my writer's daydream, my fairy tale come true, only it's so much bigger than my daydream now, I have this sense of years ahead of filling the gratitude well and trying to deserve it. The best thing a verklempt writer can do NOW is sit at her little desk or cafe table and typety-type, clackety-clack, and keep the words unspooling from whatever mystical spool they are spun upon. So here I sit, at *my* cafe, with my 20 ounces of bean juice and the beginning of a new chapter. Whew.

Thank you so much, so much, so much to Kate Howard and Hodder & Stoughton, and of course, once again, to Jane Putch, who dreams big -- a good trait in an agent! (psst, another aside to [children's/YA] writers on the agent question, I met Jane in the course of ordinary ~~schmoozing~~ networking at the annual SCBWI conference in Los Angeles, which is the MOST AMAZING TIME and happens to be coming right up, July 30-August 2; if you can possibly go, GO. If you can't possibly go, GO.)

A few other little thingamies:

--A very cool graphic anthology that Jim and I contributed to is just about to hit the stands! It's Fractured Fables from Shadowline Comics, and it's kid-friendly. Our story, "Spanking Robots" is a very short robot-Pinocchio interpretion. This book is FULL of great art and fun stories. Check it out!

-- German Lips Touch!!! This is my first-ever new cover; that is, I've had a couple of foreign editions so far, but they used the same covers as US, so this is the first time I've seen a wholly new incarnation of one of my books. Pretty cool! Looks like the title is "The Forbidden Kiss."(thank you, Jim, for sending :-)

-- Because it is so important that you know this, my hair is newly empinked, and not only that, it is FLIPPY and SASSY.

-- I am listening to Niyaz right now, which is Iranian music trio including Azam Ali of Vas (who might be my perfect musical accompaniment for the current book); they describe themselves thus:

Niyaz's music, described as "mystical music with a modern edge"[3], is primarily a blend of Sufi mysticism and trance electronica.[1][2] Niyaz adapts Persian, Indian and Mediterranean folk sounds, poetry and songs including the poetry of Sufi mystic Rumi, with Western electronic instrumentation and programming.

-- Woke to a google-chat this morning to a dear friend who happens to be in a villa in Provence right now, ooh la la; the babies peered at each other across continents and oceans, and my bed head was captured in all its glory.

-- Maybe my favorite writer's advice list EVER, certainly the one that resonates the most with me, as "my kind of writing"; from Janet Fitch, via the L.A. Times. So good. Especially #1 and #9.

-- Lastly, a new favorite reader email, from 13-year-old JB:

How dare you write so well.
The following is all your fault:
Me scouring every bookstore within 30 miles for Silksinger. (i never found it and will never forgive the bookstores)
Me breaking my code of library conduct and asking for Silksinger from a different library.
Me forcing my unfortunate mom to drive me to the library every day until it arrived.
Me reading it thru the rode home and dinner, finishing it, eating two soybeans and one slice of watermelon, crying for four minutes, and picking it up and reading it all over again.
Me sleeping with it and my copy of blackbringer ( i woke up with square imprints on my neck).
How dare you help inspire me to be a writer instead of the excellent evil villain I would have made. My minions are now destined to be pencils instead of mutants.
And how dare you consider making me pause in the devilishly good middle of silksinger to email you.

Thank you, JB! The sitting-at-the-computer part of writing (that is, like 98% of it!) is all the more worth it when broken up by receiving emails like this (and, er, announcements like the H&S one above) :-)

Happy day, all!

Photo Catch-Up

2010-07-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

I just downloaded the camera for the first time in a while; it was almost full! And in its belly I found these recent memories, and thought I'd do a little catch-up, since I haven't been posting much lately, and photos even less than that.

Miss Clementine Pie turned 11 months yesterday. Yow! How the time, she does fly.

Huh. I wonder where this kid gets her blue eyes from.
So, nose-biting (my mom, here). Some time last month, Clementine decided, all for herself, that biting noses is funny. Well, the first time she did it to me -- wholly unexpected -- I cracked up laughing, and so she's kept doing it. And now it's even funnier. I always make this mock-scared sound when she does it to me (and she's very gentle with those choppers, by the way), kind of like, "Eeeeeeeeeee!" And now, I have only to make that sound and it's her nose-bite cue. It's pretty hilarious.

This kid is the best. The best. Words cannot begin to convey the awesomeness of Clementine Pie.
(Dude. Pull my finger.)

Now, how about some food pictures.
Aebleskiver, a new Father's Day tradition. They're so fun to make! I love flipping them with a knitting needle in their darling little pan.
And they may even have been chocolate involved.
I'm calling this one "Fuel for hikers," because we stopped at Saint Cupcake on our way out of town to Silver Falls State Park last month on our anniversary.
A
nd this is what greeted us back in Portland, when we were starving in the aftermath of cupcakes.

(Oh man, I'm so tired. I'm going to fall asleep right HERE.)

Just a couple of quickie photos first. Today was another day of transforming the long-neglected patio into a pleasant space, which involved setting up a "pool pavilion" for Clementine. I'm loving it out there now. Thank you, Mom and Papa, for coming over to help with the planting!

Jeez, I really AM tired. I can barely keep my eyes open, so I'll just wrap it up. Coming up soon: A guest post involving France, cheese, and my goofiest friend, Alexandra. See you soon!

And some days I want to kiss my brain

2010-07-06T23:33:00.000-07:00

And often, the broken brain days (see last post) are followed by golden days where you kind of fall in love with your brain all over again, kiss it lots and promise it a second honeymoon (somewhere warm, but not too warm), and everything is peaches. (And not the stupid Whole Foods organic peaches that rotted in a day, either. One hopes.)

GREAT day today! Yay yay yay! Mental high fives, my characters making me laugh out loud, pages finding themselves --wham!-- written. Page, meet page. And oh wait, here's another page-friend for you to play with. Page page page. Do the page dance.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm such a dork. But I'm happy. More days like this please. On the menu of days, this will be my "usual." Hi Laini, what will you have today? Oh, the usual. Just a fabulous writing day, please. And a regular coffee. And an entire chocolate cake. And some mangoes. And beef jerky.

(What? Nothing.)

And the post-writing part of the day was lovely too. After lunch, Clementine practically swooned into a deep nap, and I swooned alongside her, exhausted from all my giddy writing joy, and then after that we got to work, along with Jim, at finally getting the patio summerified. Some of you in, ahem, summerier parts of the world, can laugh, but we've had a doozy of an Oregon spring, to the extent that the grass is still rain-green. No sprinklers have yet been needed! Can you believe? But this week the heat kicks in, summer starts, and so it was finally time to stop putting off clearing the old firewood off the patio, and the broken pots and brick-a-brack, setting up the patio table and new wading pool (oh cool delightful water!), etc. And then, of course, eating outside (pad Thai, plus the best plums and mangoes, yum). Eating outside with a baby = a good idea. They can fling pad Thai noodles to their heart's content. Oh man, Clementine got SO MESSY. The kind of messy that parents think is cute but is totally barf-gross to anyone else. She actually had a noodle plastered to her belly, inside her onesie. And mango in her hair. And yes, I took pictures.

Next patio phase will be fun, the cute-ifying part, like hanging some color, planting up some pots, which then someone will be expected to water. *looks away* Aw, sadness. That whole *looks away* thing? That's what my dearly departed Siberian husky Shiloh used to do, pretending to ignore us. The most obviously pointed look-away. It was so funny, and Jim and I used to do it to each other, when one would ask the other to do something, this sort of la-la-la, if I can't see you, I can't hear you pose. The things you start to forget. Time is the suck, isn't it?

But you know what doesn't suck (today at least)? My brain.

Smooch smooch.

How to mend a broken brain

2010-07-02T22:11:00.000-07:00

Some days are like this:

I hate writing and my brain is broken. And I'm hungry. And also stupid.

(That's an email I sent to a friend earlier today.)

You just have to kick days like that in the snoot. This morning my brain might have broken for a little while, sure, okay, but it was nothing a shower and a nap couldn't fix. Or possibly this cure:
(Add "donut" to that sign and it's perfect :-)

The nap today was, in fact, more of a cuddling of sleeping Pie whilst my brain whirred loudly, like an old, old computer. I did not/could not fall asleep, which I attribute to the second cup of coffee I had at *my* cafe this morning in an effort to avoid eating a mid-morning pastry, or, as we hobbits like to call it, "second breakfast." Filled up stomach with coffee instead. Anyway, lying there not sleeping, my story issues were carouseling in my brain, you know, the same horses and gargoyles coming around again and again, and glory halleluja, new ideas started to stir themselves to life. Yay! Who knows if they will make it into the book, but they did perk me up with a sense of possibility and improve my mood. Plus Clementine's head was right under my nose and smelled really sweet, so that probably helped too.

The problem was then finding the time to jot down the ideas before they jumped out my ear and escaped -- I imagine them running serpentine, like in comedies when people are fleeing gunfire or alligators. Zig zag. I did jot down some notes, but I doubt I will be able to read them. A certain baby was trying to liberate my pen. But she is asleep again! And now is the time to capture those fugitive ideas! More coffee is right now being consumed by me, so I say fare thee well, have a lovely weekend. Eat fruit. Pet a ghost. Kiss someone on the ear. Snore. You know. Stuff.

Coolest Video Ever

2010-06-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

Wow. Wow wow. Awesome! Makes me want to do stop motion!

Berry Face + Writing in the Spirit of Discovery

2010-06-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

A lovely weekend. More berries were picked, and more importantly, more berries were eaten:
hee hee hee. I was carrying Clementine on my back, and I couldn't see her face, just her little hand reaching forward to take the berries I was passing back to her, and at the end, this is what we found. You can imagine the back of my shirt looked much the same! Luckily I was wearing burgundy, ha ha.

It was also another amazing weekend in secret news, soon to be shared, and I got some writing in too, of course. My tiny writing cafe is ultra dead on Sundays. Yesterday I was here for four or five hours and maybe four or five people came in in all that time. The barrista sat in an armchair reading The Road!

But speaking of writing, a few posts back I think I mentioned an intention to write about "writing scenes in the spirit of discovery" and I haven't done that yet, but I think I'll take a [brief] stab at it. (Isn't that an odd and kind of awesome expression, to "take a stab" at something? Where does that come from? Is it, like, the vampire-slayer equivalent of "the old college try"?)

Writing scenes in the spirit of discovery.

Early in my blogging days, I recall that I came across a post on writing where the [now forgotten by me] writer said, "You write to find the story." And I don't know if I really knew that at the time, at least not on a conscious level. I thought you wrote to tell the story. And you do, of course, but you are also finding it. As I say in Not For Robots, it's not like picking up somebody's grocery list off the sidewalk. It's an entirely new creation of your brain, and for most of us, we're not downloading it directly from the ether, or whatever. It's a process of discovery.

Early in my own process of learning to write a novel, I came to a point (in Blackbringer, the first scene in Never Nigh when the crows are performing) where I was trying to make characters interact and bring a new place to life, and it was really really hard . . . and I gradually realized that it was really really hard because I didn't know the characters OR the place yet, and so I couldn't expect some perfect scene to just roll of my fingertips that did everything I wanted it to do. I had to get in there and kind of mess around. Like, I don't know, you know how photographers and documentary makers say that if you stick around a place long enough with your camera the subjects will start acting natural and kind of forget you're there? That's sort of what happened once I just stared playing around in Never Nigh, telling myself it didn't matter if these scenes ended up in the book or not. And many didn't! But I did start getting to know my characters, and that led to the actual scene. Ta da!

This has happened many times since then, and you'd think I'd just learn to be free and always write in "the spirit of discovery" like it's my default setting, but I don't know if you can change your default. It's like changing your height or something. You could do it, but it would involve chopping off your legs! I can't change my writing brain. I am a perfectionist, I want each scene in my books to be its own multi-faceted, highly polished jewel. And at the end of the day, I'm glad my brain works the way it does, because I really really like my writing! But I have to constantly remind myself to have a spirit of discovery. I have to force myself, every time.

And sometimes it's not intentional. I might think I am writing The Scene, you know? But after the fact, I realize it's not right, and I have to be willing to set it aside and keep trying. That's part of the process of discovery: realizing when you're not there yet. The story veers in a direction that, while cool, minimizes the overall narrative momentum, or any one of a million other reasons why it's not the right scene at the right time. Where I'm at right now in my current novel, I've laid aside a succession of chapters, each of which I thought was "the one" until a day or so after I finished it. But each time I set one aside, I understand the story better. The jewel becomes more complex and sparkly, if you will.

Not every scene you write, not even every really beautiful, cool scene, needs to be in the book. They might be stage hands instead of actors, you know, and do their important work behind the scenes. In fact, the important work performed by some scenes is in the very revelation of their wrongness! Sometimes you won't find the perfect way to move forward until you've found a few wrong ways and learned their lessons. This gives you depth. It's nothing to be down about. I think it was Thomas Edison who said, "I have not failed. I have only found 10,000 ways that won't work."

We just hope it's not 10,000!

So there's that. I don't know if it helps anyone to know this, but almost every single scene in my current novel is a not-first-effort. As much as I have bemoaned perfectionism, I truly believe there is a huge benefit to having this kind of brain. It may not be joyous in the moment, but it gives us the focus and will to keep working toward the best possible resolution to our stories, and the very best configuarions of language to convey it as directly as possible to our readers' brains.

I'm not going to edit this post because I need to get back to work instead. And THAT is a difficult thing for a perfectionist brain to do!

A trio of YA debuts

2010-06-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

Thank you so much for all the good wishes! I am so excited! It's weird working on a book for so long *in secret* -- and then it finally feels REAL. Well, real as a book. A future book. How cool. I want to be a book when I grow up! Last night I googled Daughter of Smoke and Bone for the first time and it was weird. The title is still shiny and new to me, it's different from the title I've been using *in secret* all this time, so it will take some getting used to. I really love it though, and I was really happy to get so much positive feedback on it. Thank you!

But enough about my book. How about . . . the books of others? Some news and some bragging.

First brag: I am one of the few lucky humans on the planet to have read Stephanie Perkins' brand new manuscript, Lola and the Boy Next Door.
You may remember me bragging once upon a time when I'd read her first manuscript, Anna and the French Kiss, before it was either agented or published. Now it is BOTH! Well, Steph just got her advance reading copies in the mail, so it exists in that form, and it is eminently pre-order-able (out in December!). Ahem. It is one to own AND to give to your favorite girls/young women. It is SO good, and so is Lola (which I was just the first person to rate on Goodreads!). This is the highest praise I can think of: there are (3) conditions in the universe under which I would agree to be a teenager again. They are:

1) That it be of short duration, and I am guaranteed to hop right back to my regularly scheduled life.

2) Millions of dollars in compensation. Millions.

3) That it be like living a Stephanie Perkins novel. Because . . . yum. I would be a teenager again for that. Seriously, they are dreamy and romantic but also smart and quirky and real. You will love them. Love love love. I'm so excited for the world getting to discover Stephanie's books SOON! (December, but if you are lucky or crafty, you might snag an ARC before then!) I will do a proper review once I get an ARC or copy and read the final version -- I can 't WAIT!!!!!!!!!

Second book news: Happy book birthday to the lovely and wonderful Holly Cupala, whose debut, Tell Me A Secret, came out this week. Congratulations, Holly!!! I met Holly for the first time over three years ago in New York at the winter SCBWI conference, and she is one of the people I've met through SCBWI (the other is Lee Wind), where Jim and I have had discussions as to whether they could really be that nice. Or is it just an act? Ha ha. In the case of both Lee and Holly: it's for real. That nice. Truly. And while I've only read the first few pages of Holly's book so far (more once I've read it), it is beautiful right from the start. Here's a quickie synopsis:

It's tough living in the shadow of a dead girl. . . .

In the five years since her bad-girl sister Xanda's death, Miranda Mathison has wondered about the secret her sister took to the grave, and what really happened the night she died. Now, just as Miranda is on the cusp of her dreams—a best friend to unlock her sister's world, a ticket to art school, and a boyfriend to fly her away from it all—Miranda has a secret all her own.

When two lines on a pregnancy test confirm her worst fears, Miranda is stripped of her former life. She must make a choice with tremendous consequences and finally face her sister's demons and her own.

In this powerful debut novel, stunning new talent Holly Cupala illuminates the dark struggle of a girl who must let go of her past to find a way into her own future.

Heavy.

Third and last book news o' the day: I just read Kiersten White's debut YA novel Paranormalcy (coming out in August, and also pre-order-able, hint), and it is a thorough delight! I don't know Kiersten personally, and I hear mixed accounts of her. On the one hand, she seems really funny and sweet and all good things. However, this eyewitness account presents a compelling counterpoint. Hm. I honestly don't know. Ha ha. It is clear from her hilarious blog that she is lovely and funny, and her book speaks for itself: fast-paced, handling a tense story line with a light, deft (and I have to say it, adorable) tone. I hope Kiersten doesn't mind the word "adorable." I don't mean it in ANY diminutive way. But Evie, her narrator-protagonist, is simply adorable. And she kicks ass. Often with a pink taser. See? Adorable.

Evie’s always thought of herself as a normal teenager, even though she works for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, her ex-boyfriend is a faerie, she’s falling for a shape-shifter, and she’s the only person who can see through paranormals’ glamours.

But Evie’s about to realize that she may very well be at the center of a dark faerie prophecy promising destruction to all paranormal creatures.

So much for normal.

Enjoy!

MY NEW BOOK IS ANNOUNCED!

2010-06-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

YayyyyyyyyyYAAAAAAYaAaAaAaAaAaAyYyYyYyY!!!!!!

Here it is, my news, my new book, at last! A few weeks ago when I was mysteriously happy (aw, I'm always happy), it was because my current novel was at auction and I was overflowing with glee. But I couldn't say anything, so I hinted and twiddled my fingers, and then the auction was won by the amazing Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, but I still couldn't say anything, because the official announcement had to wait until we could come up with a title.

It is now tentatively titled Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and here is the announcement as it appears in Publisher's Weekly this morning:

LBBYR Lands NBA Finalist
Little Brown Books for Young Readers senior editor Alvina Ling won world rights (excluding U.K. and Commonwealth) at auction to Laini Taylor's tentatively titled new YA novel, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Ling beat four other houses for the work, which was put on the block by Jane Putch at Eyebait Licensing & Management. Daughter, which is scheduled for fall 2011, is about a pair of star-crossed lovers kept apart by the fact that one's an angel and the other's a demon; also woven into the tale is the story of the devil's adopted daughter, a blue-haired art student in Prague. LBBYR is promising a significant marketing push for the title, which it believes will have crossover appeal to adults. Taylor's NBA finalist, 2009's Lips Touch, was published by Scholastic.

And there you have it! It has been a "devilishly" difficult book to summarize, as well as title, and the above description may have become a tad misleading in abridgment from the full announcement, but that's okay. There is indeed a strong "Romeo & Juliet with angels and devils" element to the story, but . . . what exactly do I mean by "angels and devils"? The way the supernatural elements in Lips Touch were not "textbook", neither is this, and my angels and devils are not your usual angels and devils.

For fun, here's a little background on this project:

After I finished Silksinger and it became clear that the publisher (Penguin) was not hungering for another Dreamdark book at that moment in history*, I set about writing a sci-fi book that was burning in my brain. I spent a few months on it, and . . . it was not going well. I just couldn't get a feel for it. I wasn't having FUN. Not at all. To the point, many of you will know what of I speak, that cranking up the computer in the morning (yes, I have a hand-crank computer. No, not really.) was filled with a fair amount of dread and reluctance. There's a brilliant quote:

"There are some books which refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
- Mark Twain

For myself, I find this to be so so true, and the sci-fi book, I am convinced, had not found its right form. So I was mired in the un-fun of it, the un-progress of it, and looking back in my blog to those days, I see the record of how Daughter of Smoke and Bone got itself to exist. One day:

"sitting down with a big cup of coffee and a really fun idea that has got my fingers twitching to start writing something unexpected. Just for fun, just for today. (Maybe. Then again. . .) There are wishes in it, and strings of teeth, and a scar from a bullet wound, and blue hair in pigtails, and mean widows who would probably taste like wild boar sausage if you were to eat them. Which of course you wouldn't. Gross."

(And all of that IS in this book, except the widows who taste like wild boar sausage. So far, anyway!)

And then the next entry was THIS ONE. Ah, I remember that day so well, and I'm so glad I have the blog post to commemorate it. I felt lighter than air. I still have the exact text of that first day of writing. The book has veered and grown and grown and grown, but in that first day's work there is still the spirit of it, and all the fun and promise.

The next blog entry, incidentally:

"The writing of the weird new thing progresses newly and weirdly. Still fabulous fun. Strange things are happening involving marionettes, chinese swords, rosary beads, and a beautiful boy who is half-Maasai. In Venice."

Ha ha. None of those things are still in the book! Well, maybe the Chinese swords . . . sort of.

So, did I go back to that poor, tortuous sci-fi book, or abandon it right then and there? Well . . . actually, I followed my own rule of not being seduced by "the slutty new idea" and I kept slogging at the sci-fi book! I behaved. Well, I am here to tell you that behaving is not always for the best! I finished a draft of that sci-fi, and I never even read it. I tacked that "the end" on with the sound of a door slamming, and I have NEVER read that manuscript! It was misery to write, and I'm sure it would be misery to read! Did I learn a lesson? I don't know. But getting back to the blue-haired girl book was like . . . getting out of jail? Maybe a little. The timing was perfect: I had a beach weekend writing retreat set up with a couple of friends (this was early in my pregnancy with Clementine), and on the first day of the retreat I wrote the first chapter of "Daughter." (That is now Chapter 13, by the way), and I haven't looked back. I have only taken long, long pauses. Ha ha. I found pregnancy delightful and distracting, and then there were those newborn months. They may also, er, ahem, have been another book written in the interim. (What? What are you looking at? )

So that's the history of this book so far, and I'm am SO THRILLED about where it stands now, in the amazing, creative hands of the team at Little, Brown, who have knocked my socks off from the first moment of the auction. This is my writer's life fairy tale, with the caveat that in the fairy tale, the writing part is easier! And this book is STILL deeply, deeply fun, but of course it is work too. I have many notebook pages of roads not taken with this idea, which at every moment is sending off shoots in tantalizing directions, so that I have to be a ruthless gardener and prune and snip and cull. (Me and my mixed writing metaphors!)

There's something I talked about in my plotting talk at SCBWI WW recently, and it really should be its own blog post, so perhaps I'll expand upon it in my next post, but it's: the willingness to write scenes in the spirit of discovery, even knowing they might not make it into the book. I have so many discarded scenes, but they all contribute a richness to the plot and characterization, even if it only sneaks in in hints and hues on account of me having made the world of the story real to myself in discarded chapters. More on that later!

So, to sum up: WHOOOOOP! Hurray! Thank you thank you THANK YOU, Little, Brown, and Alvina Ling (my new editor!), as well as my FABULOUS agent, Jane Putch, for some of the most exciting weeks of my professional life! I look to the future with such excitement as the life of this new book unrolls ahead of me.
That said, back to writing!

*re: more Dreamdark books: some day I will finish the series! I am deeply committed to Magpie and crew and feel sick about leaving them in limbo. I will see their story through. It is just not in the cards for the next few years.

Did you know strawberries could be RED in the middle?

2010-06-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Ha ha. Every year it surprises me, when strawberry season rolls around and we get good, ripe Northwest strawberries instead of those giant, alien, white-inside things that come on trucks from god-knows-where. Strawberries can be RED all the way through! And soooooo sweet. Yesterday we went picking on Sauvie Island, which is an island of farms in the Columbia River. In past years we've blinked and missed strawberry season, but not this year. Yum. Clementine enjoyed herself.

Like dingbats, Jim and I forgot to bring a baby carrier, so we took turns holding her on our hip while we picked, which was actually pretty easy. She was a totally jabberwocky the whole time, calling across the fields to people, and speaking her own language in such deep earnestness, it was like she was trying to convince us of something. And isn't her hat THE BEST? It just came in the mail from the lovely Lori in Amsterdam, and comes from the Dutch department store Hema, to which I have never been, but love nevertheless. Lori sends the most insanely cute stuff for Clementine -- so much cuter than the cost-equivalent in the US! It's like inexpensive baby clothes in the US are required to have little sayings on them like "daddy's little angel" or "cutie pie" or whatever, which is fine, but really: totally inescapable. Not so the Dutch stuff, plus, the fabric. It's awesome. Can't wait to someday get in there MYSELF to shop!

What else? Nothing else. Oh wait, yes. One weird thing. I am developing a permanent furrow of wrinkled skin on the inside of my left forearm, from holding Clementine (exactly as in photo above). Her weight pulls the skin into a long series of puckers, and they don't ever go away now. Ah, age. My skin doesn't have the elasticity to unwrinkle itself anymore, sigh, and carrying those 20ish adorable Clementine pounds are taking their toll. At least I'm not having wrist cysts and weird shoulder nerve damage, like Jim is. Now, I'm not necessarily recommending having children young -- there are many, many good reasons to wait, like getting one's writing and art careers going -- but age has its disadvantages too. Like a wrinkled forearm! A small price to pay :-)

Flying brain-men and impending doom

2010-06-16T08:18:00.001-07:00

You know how, the more you blog, the more you have to blog about, and the less you blog, the harder it is? Well. I feel all floundery. What to blog about? I miss it! I miss the connection with so many people. I miss feeling like this space is an extension of my life in some way. It has been, lately, more like the room in the house that you never go in, the one with the closed door. Oh, don't look in there ..." And not even in a fascinating Bluebeardy way, full of dead wives or anything -- just in a boring way. That room is boring.

Huh. Bluebeard. That reminded me of something. When we first moved into our house, 9 years ago, the girls across the street (kids at the time, now grown up) were putting on a play in their yard, and it was Bluebeard. They had even made "dead wives" on butcher paper, life size, and rigged a closet to hang them in, for the heroine to discover. It was gruesome and awesome.

But anyway. My blog-closet hides no gruesome secrets. Just a lack of TIME. Time time time. There is time on a daily basis for a) Jim and Clementine, and b) writing. Right now, this time falls into "writing." Jim is home with Clementine, and I am at the cafe down the street that is my new writing space. Each morning after breakfast I attire myself in something a small presentability-step above pajamas, and I walk down a gravel road, about four blocks, with an umbrella (because god, Oregon, really. Haven't you heard it's JUNE?), to this very small, very quiet cafe.
And here I sit writing away. By lunchtime my clothes smell like roast coffee, which isn't a great smell, a few hours later. I kept thinking I reeked of cigarettes and couldn't understand why. I mean, obviously no one was smoking in the cafe. I have always had a poor sense of smell. A poor ability to identify smells, anyway. They seem obvious once someone else names them, but until then I'm like, Um, onion? garlic? I don't know. Tastes too. Whatever station in the brain is responsible for that function, my little brain-men aren't manning it well. Or maybe they put the sleepiest guys on that job, I don't know.

What? Don't you have brain-men? They are very very small. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they aren't there.

There is a heavy concentration of brain-men (and women) around the writing station, though, and they all have their opinions, very very strong opinions, and here's what I think happens. One of them takes the helm and we write an awesome chapter. Then I take a nap, and when I get back to work, there's a different brain-man on duty, and he has all new ideas for that chapter. I am powerless. We end up rewriting. This goes on for a while until I knock my head against the wall and they go flying around like crash-test dummies ...

Um. Sometimes when I'm blogging I really worry you are going to think I am insane. Don't worry. All is well.

So here I am, at my cafe. I have something on the horizon with which I have very little experience. That something is ... a DEADLINE. *gasps in horror* It's a scary word! It even has "dead" in it! Doesn't it just sound sort of "impending doomy"? I sort of had deadlines for the Dreamdark books, and there was one winter, truly, when I did very very little besides write Silksinger. I remember it well.But never before have I had a real firm deadline AND a baby. It is an interesting combination, and explains my poor blog showing of late. Honestly.

Life at its simplest. My wardrobe consists of what is on top. On top of the glider chair, that is, which doesn't get glided in much on account of being my new open-air closet. I still live in nursing tanks, and put a t-shirt over it to leave the house. So glamorous. Mostly I wear black yoga-ish pants, because my jeans are all long and require platform shoes of some sort, and I am less and less that person, though my wardrobe hasn't really caught up to whatever person I am now. Today I wanted to wear jeans though, so I am wearing my black platform boots, and the four gravel blocks to the cafe felt like quite a trudge.
When writing, I wear a silver wishbone pendant Jim gave me for our anniversary. It's kind of a totem. Ponytails are ubiquitous. Showers are not ubiquitous. I mean, that's like 20 minutes of writing! heh heh. Fortunately, I am not a stinky person. Not that I've gone more than a day without a shower. Nooooooo. Heh. Because that would be gross... Ahem.

So you see, my life of glamour. Jim and I did get out for a date the other night, though, and it was marvelous. Funnily enough, we went to see a kid's movie! But honestly, when you live in the rabbit hole and then poke your head out to see what's playing at the movies ... what a bunch of crap right now! So we saw How To Train Your Dragon and holy, it was AWESOME!!!! Have you seen it? Doesn't matter if you have kids or not. It's just great. I even wore a dress out (from the actual closet, and WITHOUT a nursing tank, and then we went out to dinner and had a decadent three-course meal, with house-made pasta, and wine pairings. Wine pairings! And no squiggling wiggler on my lap. Of course, we missed her, and got out the iphone midway through dinner to look at pictures of her . . .
(tee hee.)

But now, time is flashing past, and my brain-men are cranking up the writing station, so I'd better go see what they're up to before they decide on any new ways the last chapter might unfold. (No! Bad brain-men! Onward, only forward!)

:-)

Goblin Shark Madness!

2010-06-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

Check out this totally crazy creature! The video is in Japanese, but just watch this shark's monstrous MOUTH. Oy!Nature, you give me nightmares. Sweet, sweet nightmares.

Paris Christmas in June

2010-06-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

I have the best best friend ever. She just got back from a trip to France, and she showered us with such an abundance of gifts it felt like Christmas. My oh my oh my oh my. I'm so lucky! Behold:
Those incredible stuffed animals are from Moulin Roty (UK version website), where I am now dying to go shopping myself! These little guys are called "Les Jolis Pas Beaux" which means "the pretty uglies" though there is nothing ugly about them -- they are pure cuteness.
Notebooks, stickers, candy. I have always been crazy about cute little notebooks, and these are awesome. One of them is Mouk, by French illustrator Marc Boutavant, who is a favorite of mine!
Beautiful soap that could easily be mistaken for candy!
A summery outfit for Clementine.
Too-awesome Moroccan slippers that might have been made just for me! And in front of them, the vintage children's blocks, those are a gift from the wonderful Tara of Paris Parfait, who has made me drool over French shopping for several years now, with her gorgeous photos of shop displays. She also sent this antique cake plate that is as pretty as candy:
Wow, totally unexpected! Thank you, Tara! And thank you my dear dear Alexandra. I can't wait to go on a trip and bring back a trove of wonders for you. Or better yet, let's rent a house in Morocco, and shop the souks together :-)

little painting

2010-06-04T23:19:00.000-07:00

Look at the little painting Jim did for me for Mother's Day. I love it so much!

And that is my incredibly wordy blog post for this evening. I am so tired. Won't be getting any late-night writing done tonight, sigh. At least I had a good morning writing at my cafe. I realized yesterday that the last chapter I had written was taking things in the wrong direction, so I rewrote it with a cool new idea and it fell into place so much better. You know how sometimes you suddenly realize something about your w.i.p. and then feel like a dolt for not having recognized it sooner? It just seems so obvious? It was one of those moments. A true "duh" moment. Oh well, better late than never.

Cheers!

Have fun AND be awesome!

2010-06-03T02:16:00.001-07:00

Hey Portlanders, whatcha doin Saturday? Want to have fun and be awesome at the same time? You can! No, you totally can. Come to the Rockstar Stella leukemia benefit concert! Actually, there are two events on Saturday, a kid-friendly daytime hoojiggy (no, not a real word, but good, don't you think? It would be a good name for a not-very-tame exotic pet, like a monkey or marsupial; you could call it "Hooj" for short) with music and food and belly dancing and a "jammin' jump rope exhibition," and later, an evening music event. There will be food, dance exhibitions, a silent auction, arts & crafts, and a Red Cross bus for blood donation. And all the proceeds go to support the medical treatment of beautiful 8-year-old Stella, who is battling AML leukemia with a rare FLT3 gene mutation. You can read more about her cancer, and about the benefit, HERE.

Stella's mom, Dana, is responsible for the awesome pinkness of my hair. Stella's step-father, Peter, was one of our first friends when we moved to Portland nine years ago. They are a fun, creative, warm family living through a nightmare. Stella's attitude is amazing. One shudders to imagine such places as pediatric oncology units, but the couple of times we've been to visit, it was a whirlwind of kids racing the corridors on big wheels, with art everywhere and total wild kid energy. There were also the stricken faces of parents coping with unimaginable bad news.

The idea. The idea. My mind can't turn down that alley. I can't conceive of what Dana and Peter are going through. They remain totally upbeat and positive that Stella is going to have the best possible outcome, because anything else is unthinkable. They've organized this totally amazing fundraising event, and I hope you can come, or if you're not local, you can still DONATE HERE.

Jim is donating a Batman painting to the silent auction. If you like it, come buy it!

I'm donating a little parcel of signed books and maybe a Laini's Lady or two.

Hope to see you there! Wishing glowing good health to all the children in your life! xoxo

Oh my poor neglected blog

2010-05-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

A week since my last post!? I'm really dropping the ball here. Sigh. Remembering the *old days* when Clementine was a newborn and I could blog with her asleep in my lap. Not anymore!

Time is at such a premium these days. I've set a schedule for myself for the book in progress, and it's fairly grueling, but I'm really excited about it too. The trick this summer will be to make plenty of time for doing fun stuff too. Jim and I have always had a difficult balance with life and work, and it's always been at its worst in summer, which is unfair. We would have grand plans for camping and such, and then one of us would always seem to get a deadline that meant workworkwork. And so we've done woefully little camping and exploring in our adopted state of Oregon, where we have now been for more than 9 years. We haven't even been to Crater Lake, for goodness sake!

And then there are the little summer things, like berry-picking on Sauvie Island, the zoo concert series, Saturday Market, trips to the beach, the river, farmer's market, and just sitting at some cafe patio somewhere drinking something, and you know, all that good stuff. I want to make a list of things to not neglect to do this summer. It's Clementine's first summer, and though she won't remember it, I want it to be full of loveliness.

I read a great retweet the other day, which originated from one of my very favorite artists, Dave McKean, who has a visual imagination like no one else on this planet. The tweet was his New Year's resolution, and it was:

"More unequivocal days, that is: WORK days and PLAY days, not guilty play days and distracted work days."

Yes. Yiss yiss yiss. That. Only, in my case it will be unequivocal hours, not whole days. My writing times are: the morning from about 8:30 to about 12:30, and then after Clementine goes to bed in the evening, which tonight was a disastrously late 10 pm! I don't know what happened there. She just didn't want to sleep. Not the usual. But anyway, just this past week I started trying out the cafe nearest my house for writing in the mornings, and it's going well.

I've never been a big cafe writer, because people are noisy! How DARE they go to cafes and TALK? Don't they know writers are at work? Ha ha. I bottle that outrage and keep it to myself :-) But the good thing about this particular cafe, aside from it being only a few blocks away, is that it is plain and small and quiet -- not hip or exciting or especially delicious. There's not much to get distracted by. Well, the other day three women were gossiping about their fellow Girl Scout leaders, and that was a pain, but I drowned them out with my ipod (I was listening to Vas, which is great moody ambient stuff, perfect for the atmosphere of my book).

I do have a writing room at home, and it seems a shame to go spend money on coffee every day, but if I stay home I end up getting sucked into the cuteness of Jim and Clementine. It's inevitable. The tractor beam of cuteness. So: the cafe. Onward, book!

So, those were some unequivocal WORK hours last week. Here are some PLAY hours. Jim and Clementine and I went to this newish restaurant called Slappycakes where the tables have pancakes griddles in the middle and you make your own. It was totally fun! My favorite was the peanut butter-butterscotch chip concoction :-)

A funky mural on Belmont:

Also, we went to a pizza-grilling party at our friends' house yesterday -- Matt Holm, illustrator of the fabulous Baby Mouse, and his wife Cyndi, who makes wine and all manner of cool crafty things, including a pink wig for Clementine when she was a newborn! -- and Matt had made, get this, homemade mozzarella. And it was totally good! Who makes their own cheese??? Show-offs, that's who! Ha ha, just kidding. He also made the pizza dough, which was great. I made something too: a tres leches cake, thank you Martha Stewart. I'd never made that cake before. Have you? It's a super simple cake, and then right after you take it out of the oven, you pierce it all over with a skewer and then slowly pour this milk mixture over it: whole milk, evaporated milk, and sweetened condensed milk, so the cake gets all spongy and saturated. I was skeptical that it would absorb so much milk, but it did. And then top with fresh whip cream + fruit. It was really good, but you know, we had a little bit and left it at the party, and I kind of wanted more, so today I made another one. Oink oink.

Shoot. It's 11 pm already. I'd better get my bones back to work!

What I've been doing lately

2010-05-25T08:24:00.001-07:00

So what's been up around here lately? Oh, stuff.

-Non-stop rain, for one thing. What is this, the Pacific Northwest?

-I got my hair re-pinked yesterday, and was told afterward, while ordering plantain burritos, that I had "the most perfectly dyed hair" that the counter girl had ever seen. Why, thank you very much :-)

-I saw a movie on the weekend with one of my Portland writer friends, Bridget Zinn -- Letters From Juliet, which stays in your head for about as long as it takes gelato to melt on a hot day. Of the various romantic interests in the film, I thought the 70-year-old Italian, Franco Nero, was the hottest. Here he is at not-70:

-We've been chasing the "portable mess-maker" that is crawling Clementine. Wow! The world is made of things to grab. (Actually, right this MOMENT she is discovering the stairs for the first time. Yow! Don't worry - I'm not just sitting here watching her climb up stairs. Well, okay, I am, but Jim is with her!)
Doesn't she look totally fierce here? Like a little lion guarding her prey, ha ha!

-We had dinner last week with another Portland writer friend, Suzanne Young, at their totally cool new house, which is a geodesic dome in the woods.

-I've been reading Marie Rutkoski's The Celestial Globe, the sequel to The Cabinet of Wonders. Both are wonderful middle-grade adventures set in Bohemia, London, and other exotic locales. Reading is slow-going these days, since the reading-while-nursing days are over, sigh.

-I have collected a stack of library books on siege warfare, but haven't breached them yet. That's my *assignment* for the next little while. Wouldn't it be great to go back to college and take a bunch of awesome history classes? Well, you know: not for a grade. I wouldn't have to write the papers, I'd just sit in on the lectures, do the reading. Maybe some day I will. I didn't get to take enough history classes in college. I got churned out of there in four years -- that's just not enough time!

-I have eaten approximately 2-1/2 mango tango donuts from Voodoo :-), while sharing the other 1-1/2 with Jim, because that's the kind of wife I am. (Hm. I suppose a really good wife would have shared 50/50, wouldn't she? It's okay. Jim is a health nut. That's a lot of donut for him!)

-I got a wonderful fan letter yesterday from a 6th grader in Florida, who told me that as soon as she finished reading Blackbringer, she flipped to the beginning and began again. I LOVE that, because when I really love a book, I do the same thing. (*love*)

-Did I tell you? I found out [from the translator] that Lips Touch sold Indonesian rights. So cool! It will be my first Asian edition. Yippeeeee!

-I have been writing my new book, for which I am filled with love.

-And I have mostly been occupied with something else I will tell you about soon. Soon. (And no, I'm not pregnant -- funny how that's always the first thing people think! Speaking of, though, did you hear that Shannon Hale is going to have twins???)

Have a happy day!

Today . . .

2010-05-20T00:05:00.001-07:00

Today . . . . . . is a good day.

:-)

Clementine, Crawling and Purring

2010-05-17T06:45:00.000-07:00

Oh man. :-)

Super Random Joke :-)

2010-05-16T10:21:00.001-07:00

I'm not a real jokey person, mostly because I can't remember jokes or tell them well, but heck, even I can type a joke. This is so random, I totally love it.

* * *

Every year, Joe takes a week during summer to relax at his friend's cabin in the Maine woods. One night after he's just arrived, he's sitting in the cabin when he hears a knock at the door. He opens the door and doesn't see anything--until he looks down. On the wooden porch he sees a small snail. Annoyed, he picks up the snail and throws it as far as he can.

Three years later, Joe is back in the cabin for another summer retreat. There's a knock on the door. He opens it and sees nothing, then remembers. He looks down--and there's the same snail!

The snail says: "What the hell was that all about?"

* * *

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...HAHAHAHA! *gasp sputter* ha ha ha. Seriously. Love it. Love the random.

Happy Sunday! Ours if off to a terrific start with the neighbor weed-whacking directly under the window while Clementine was trying to take her morning nap. And this after she mowed and whacked two days ago. ARG! Oh, and it's raining, after a few days of fabulous sun, so there's that. But I have to be indoors working anyway, so who cares.

Cheers!

New Laini's Ladies

2010-05-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

As I hunker down to a new batch of Laini's Ladies, it occurred to me that I probably didn't show you the last batch, which are available now HERE.

"When I have a little money, I buy books. If I have any left over, I buy food and clothes." - Erasmus

"There is nothing better than a friend . . . unless it is a friend with chocolate." - Charles Dickens

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." - Mae West

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Berthold Auerbach

I also didn't show you the baby announcement illustration I did last month for my dear friends in Amsterdam:
(the canal houses and tulips = Amsterdam; the cats are their cats; and the rocket ship - The Stork! - and robot in the background are at the request of the dad :-) I had so much fun doing this, and I'm so happy Fletcher is in the world. Yay, babies!

The weather got suddenly gorgeous in Portland yesterday, which diminished my productivity considerably. Those of you who live in year-around sun, how do you get anything done? Do you just get used to it? Hm. I know that when Jim and I moved here in the dead of a particularly wet and grey winter, we discovered the huge benefit to creativity that nasty weather brings. We stayed inside our first few months, and developed work habits that have stayed with us. But yesterday was so pretty! We walked to our favorite Thai place for take-out and then went to the park with pad Thai, dumplings, fresh spring rolls, a tupperware of watermelon chunks, and some chocolate-covered coconut shortbread (from my sister). Clementine watched the bigger kids race around the playground, and she got to go in the bucket swing, and she crawled in the grass.

Crawled.

Suddenly she's crawling. Yikes! It's so cute. Then, back home and thinking to get some work done maybe, the phone rang and it was my best friend beckoning me out again, and I gave in easily and so did Jim, and we all went back to Mississippi Avenue for more pineapple ginger ale floats. So there went the afternoon. Here's the food cart:
So pink! And their sign:

And then by evening, Clementine was saying, "Bedtime? What is this "bedtime" you speak of?" and so it wasn't until around 9 pm that I got around to doing a little work. You can imagine how inspired I was. (Actually, I had done a couple of hours of writing in the morning! I vowed to do it no matter what else is going on in a day, and so far I haven't broken that vow.)

Today: more wonderful distractions loom. So I'd better get that couple of hours of writing in now. Laini's Ladies, see you tonight, probably around 9 pm again. Ha!

Clementine at Nine Months + My First Mother's Day!

2010-05-11T23:07:00.000-07:00

Somehow it's been nine months already. Astonishing. And yet, in a way it feels like it's been longer than that. Memories of Clementine's newborn tininess are fading. Today I was holding her sideways across my body and I caught sight of us in the mirror and she seemed gigantic. She's grown so much, and every day now brings new developments. The motorcycle mouth sound (brrrrrffffffvvvvvvvv), like little boys make playing cars; the squiggling becomes a commando-crawl; maniac sleep rolling, so she covers the surface of the bed; feeding me tastes of her dinner; fake-coughing, and then laughing at herself; total resistance to the changing table, for some reason . . . and so many little things, minute by minute.

It scares me that my memories of the past nine months are not crisp and in order, like the pages of an album. I want to remember everything, but what I'm finding is that new memories are overwriting old ones. Details blur. Photos help, and I started belatedly keeping a little journal of landmarks -- wish I'd done that from the beginning. I feel this mania to record it all, like it's the most important thing in the universe, but I just can't get my act together. Sometimes there's not enough time to both live the days and record them, alas, in which case one must choose to live them, and hope to remember.

Speaking of recording things, my blog has hit a slow patch. You may have noticed that I haven't updated much, and that when I have it's either WRITING or CLEMENTINE. Well, yeah. Pretty much. Add Jim in there, with some friends, some walks, and a smattering of cake, and that's life these days. (Mm. Cake.) I cruise around (occasionally) to blogs and I feel this thing I've felt ever since I started blogging (and before, but more clearly since blogging), and that is a frantic desire to DO EVERYTHING. To fit six or seven lives into my one life, not end to end, but side by side. I want to have the hiking/outdoors life, the arts and crafts life, the beautiful lifestyle/decorating life, the garden life, the thoughtful book reviewer life, etc etc. I envision my blog a certain dreamy way that I don't have time for, and that means I guess that I envision my life a certain dreamy way that I don't have time for.

Choices, dagnabbit. I could take a sewing class and make adorable baby dresses, or I could work on my book. I could go garden-crazy and make a great play/lounge space for summer (and I reallyreally want to!!!) or I could work on my book. It goes on like that. Life has gone fairly narrow right now, which doesn't mean it isn't incredibly rich. The more the river narrows, the more powerful the current. True of rivers, and maybe-sometimes true of life? Can't let it narrow too much though.

One of the great things about having a child is that it makes me see each moment and day as precious for Clementine's sake. If it were only Jim and me, we would go on in our routine of working all day and evening, and not getting out and moving in the world. We would put off that whole "living" thing in favor of working, like life is going to start at some later date, once we're "ready". But for Clementine, we want to build a beautiful childhood with hikes and geese and playmates and toes in the grass and all the wonders that are out there, so we do stuff. Stuff!

On Mother's Day we got out for a little bit and discovered a fun new place to eat, and we walked in the sun and bought gigantic flowers, and we shared a pineapple float that was ridiculously good!

In Portland, food carts are kind of a big deal. We don't go to them much, because we never think of it, but the other day we drove past a cute-looking court of food carts on upper Mississippi Ave, and we needed a snack on Mother's Day to tide us over until dinner with my parents, so we went there. And oh my. So. Good. We chose this one nondescript silver trailer (Garden State) because of a good-sounding sandwich (chicken and cured lemons with goat cheese and asparagus! Cured lemons were the kicker. So good!), and it was DELICIOUS, and we found out after that this cart had won the Willamette Week's "Carty Award" last month for overall tastiness. If you're a Portlander, go by and try this sandwich, though they're more famous for the chickpea-cake sandwich, which looked awesome too. After that we had a pineapple float from the "Sugar Cube" cart = pineapple ice cream + house-made ginger syrup + ginger ale. It was perfect on a warm day. I will go back just for that. Seriously.

And to make this an even more perfect lunch spot: it backs up to the sunny beer garden of the German restaurant Prost, who invite you to bring in your food, so long as you buy their drinks. Done and done.

Here's me with my girl on my first Mother's Day:
The three of us strolled around, bought giant peonies, got coffee, loved our city, loved each other, and then stopped at the Pastaworks deli to buy an assortment of salamis to bring along with fig & anise rolls to my parents' house. It was kind of silly: we made the girl shave us off a couple of meager slices of a bunch of different salamis. (There are a lot of kinds of salami.) She endured good-naturedly.

Somebody slept through the whole thing:

Later, lolling and opening presents (so many presents! Like a birthday. I was seriously spoiled!) and playing with the cats at my parents' house. Here is Clementine offering coconut marshmallows to Bea:
And meeting my mom's tortoise, who is the most *loving* tortoise you will ever meet:
And, my sweeties in mom's garden:

And a couple of recent shots, marking time:

Clementine at nine months, you are our delight. Beautiful and hilarious, determined, sunny, silk-soft, sweet-smelling, and endlessly fascinating, I have not experienced a moment's frustration with you in nine entire months. Even when you're crabby, which is rare, I feel only tenderness and a desire to make you un-crabby again, to which end I will do preposterous dances, invent silly songs, nibble your toes, run for the Cheerios, or just show you yourself in the mirror. Even you can't look at your adorableness and stay crabby!

Welcome, last week, to tooth #3, and to the first hints of sleep-resistance (joy!). You are revving up to crawl in earnest. You aren't quite doing it yet, but you are locomoting in your own squirmy, determined way. The best bait to lure you to crawl? Library books, new ones with crisp crinkly wrappers. Ah, the crinkle! Favorite foods? Steamed carrots, hummus, pear, guacamole. And you were a fan of the pineapple ice cream float!

This next month will bring even more and faster changes, I think. Whatever they are, I'm sure they will be even more fun that what came before them. I love you.

Writing about writing, and then ... driving to Seattle again!

2010-05-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

So I'm giving a talk tonight to the Writing For Children program at University of Washington. Spoke to them last year too and what an awesome class! Since it's all new students this time, the teacher had invited me to reprise my same talk, which seemed like a sound plan to me. It's time-consuming, after all, to prepare these things. So last night I opened the file to go over it quickly in preparation . . . and, um, oops.

See, it's highly likely that everyone in this class will have JUST heard me speak (maybe twice) at the SCBWI conference in Seattle -- same small community -- and there was a lot of repetition in this talk. So. Last night I prepared a NEW talk. Ha ha! This one is called "Filling Up the Book" and is an offshoot of my Plot talk, focused on: how to fill up an entire book with things happening. Because I totally remember my high school and college writings and strivings, and how much staring at blank pages I did then, while the vasty twilight wasteland of the unwritten book spread out before me, taunting me to fill it. And I didn't and couldn't and didn't and couldn't, and then finally (in my 30s) I rolled up my sleeves and did and could. And now I have tricks and methods and that vasty twilight wasteland is my playground, mwahahahahahahaha!

So, onward to Seattle! And yes, a 3-ish hour drive (each way) for a 1-ish hour talk. Sigh. I'm a patsy. But after this I go into total writerly hibernation to put my theories into nonstop practice. I've been on a good regimen these past couple of weeks of writing EVERY DAY no matter what, at least for an hour, to keep my head in it and not forget what's going on. I hate that, when I stop for too long, and I am NOT GOING TO DO IT ANYMORE!

Have a great day, all!
:-)

Okay, awesome

2010-04-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

I hesitate to give you this link, out of fear you will disappear into it and never come back here, but ... sigh. Take it and go with my blessing. But try to come back and visit me. Or, maybe I will run into you there and we can shake our heads in solidarity and go, "I know. Exactly." It's Timothy's Hallinan's amazing series of essays on Finishing Your Novel. I linked to it recently, but in such a way that you could gloss over it. Not so now. It's a must-read if you're learning how to finish a book.

I discovered them while researching my plotting talk, and I've been back a few times, including just now, when I read the "Your Critic" chapter and it totally hit home. Pretty much everything he says resonates with me and makes me go, "Me too! Oh, me too!"

Somewhere in his blog I came across a letter written to him by Helen Simonson, author of the debut novel and big buzzy bestseller Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (which I have not read, but plan to, though I'm 144th on the list at the library!), in which she confessed that it was his website that got her to finish the book, and that while she was in the throes of it, she banned herself from all sites but his. Huh. Cool.

Also: fantastic writing quotes. One day I will comb through his entire site and pilfer them for the margin of Not For Robots, where I keep my own collection of writing quotes. (Not For Robots could really use an overhaul/updating. Maybe I will do that after I finish my current novel!)

Thank you, Timothy Hallinan! And, I just picked up one of your books. Cheers!

Thank you, Story Sleuths!

2010-04-27T20:15:00.001-07:00

Wow, this is totally awesome. This amazing blog, Story Sleuths, run by Meg Lippert, Allyson Valentine Shrier, and Heather Hedin Singh, has devoted five posts to a study of Blackbringer -- this is the closest I have ever come to having my book taught in school. I mean, they really examine different elements of craft very closely and with examples, and as a writer it is such a thrill to have someone pay such close attention to my work--and to use it as a teaching tool. Wow! I get a glow reading these. Thanks also to their guest poster, amazing Portland fantasy writer Susan Fletcher, for stepping in and adding her own thoughts. This blog is like no other I've discovered, as far as examining the minutiae of craft. Check it out:

Post #1: Point of View in Blackbringer
Post #2: Word Choice & Language
Post #3: Suspense
Post #4: Midpoint
Post #5: Lending Fantasy a Semblance of Truth, an essay by Susan Fletcher

Thank you, ladies! This series is really a GIFT to me.

Speaking of gifts (how's that for a segue???), a certain husband just celebrated a birthday, and we had a delightful family day this'ing and that'ing around town -- do you do that enough? Just go do fun stuff, browse shops and have meals out and stroll? We do not generally do it enough. It's more like while running errands I see other people enthusiastically doing nothing and I get jealous and want to do enthusiastic nothing too. With pancakes, and brand new books, and a general sense of slothful decadence. So the whole day was like that, awesomely. Pancakes were consumed! New books were had! The zoo was strolled!

And man, going to the zoo on a sunny Sunday = MISTAKE!!! SO crowded! This is going to sound small of me, but I get so irked at the zoo when parents keep misidentifying the animals to their kids, particularly when they're standing right next to the sign and just can't be bothered to read it! African wild dogs are not hyenas, and meerkats are most emphatically not "ugly kitties"!!! And yes, dude, there IS a difference between a monkey and an ape! And while I'm on the topic, it is a nerdy ultra-peeve of mine when apes and monkeys are interchanged in picture books!!! Chimpanzees are not wee little swingy monkeys with long tails, yo! Look it up, illustrators!

Okay. Sorry. Done.

So lovely lovely day, and not only that, we had a real live superhero with us. Really. Her name is Awesome Pie!

(This outfit was her birthday gift for her papa. She picked it out herself, really. I didn't even know what was in it :-)
And you know, capes make handy nap blankets, because even super heroes get snoozy.
Man, I am crazy about this kid, and cra-a-a-azy about her papa. Lucky lucky me. Happy birthday, sweetie. Smooch!

Writing Quote of the Day

2010-04-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

(And no, that does not mean I will post a writing quote every day. But I surely could. There are a LOT of writing quotes out there!)

"Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, Oh well, I'm going to put away the writing until my children are grown, then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing. If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous -- which is very different."

--Jane Yolen

Hm. Now, on the one hand, yeah. Totally. But on the other hand, this quote lacks a certain empathy. I mean, it doesn't account for the way fear and paralysis can make some of us tell ourselves stupid things and rationalize writing away. It doesn't mean we're only after the fame. It might mean rather that we have issues, are afraid of failure, have tricky high-strung brains, etc. I do have empathy for all those things, and yet, Jane Yolen is totally right. If you are going to be a writer you must find a way to do your writing. You just must. There are few among you (by which I mean people who find the time to read blogs :-) who really and truly couldn't carve out some time. I had a thought recently, driven by baby schedule desperation, that maybe I would have to get up from like 2 am to 4 am, guaranteed baby sleep hours, to write. I didn't do it, haven't had to yet, but I could and I suppose will, if necessary. Instead, I'm having a second cup of evening coffee right now (9:30 pm) and hopefully will have several hours of productive brain + sleeping baby to work with. Fingers crossed!

Now, to work!

Sensory Deprivation Writing Chamber

2010-04-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

“The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. . . . But he is not to do any other thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines . . . . Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”
-Raymond Chandler

How about that, writers? If you were locked in an empty room for four hours with nothing but your w.i.p., you'd write, right? Me too! Off to set up a sensory deprivation writing chamber! Sure, the Remote Writing Cabin sounds much cuter, but maybe not quite so effective. As I recall, people kept putting books and stuff in it, plus which, knowing me, I'd probably hide in the woods all day trying to catch the mysterious woodland visitors in the act of placing hot pies on the doorstep. (I once crouched in the snow for several hours with my camera, trying to get a picture of my cat using the door knocker. I got the shot, and it kills me that it's been lost! Not to mention the cat. Man, she was a smart cat.)

Well, I am back to writingwritingwriting, and I am going to subdue that unruly w.i.p. Make no mistake! Today I am taking my own advice, which is to write some scenes without undue attachment to the outcome, in the spirit of discovery, the goal being to get to know one of my characters better. There's a wall I keep hitting with him, and I realize it's because he's just not *real* yet. So that's what I'm doing today. You?

(Okay, I'm not really setting up a sensory deprivation chamber, but I should.)

PLOT -- Part III: Structure

2010-04-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

[Plot -- Part I: What is Plot?]
[Plot -- Part II: Character, Motivation, and Conflict]

Is structure the same thing as plot? Close. It's the way you organize your plot. I'm going to stick to super-basics here and talk about: the beginning, middle, and end, your basic three-act structure, which is as old as the dramatic arts, dating back at least to the Greeks. Even complex plots mostly fit into this basic frame, for the reason that it works -- it is the perfect frame for satisfying those basic readers' needs.

I know the part everyone worries about is the middle, the big dread middle, but let's start at the beginning with ... beginnings!

Beginnings
This is the "easy part", right? I mean, who among us has not written 11,000 beginnings? Ha! I know I have. But I don't think it's true that beginnings are easy. I think sometimes the reason a story doesn't make it to the middle is because the beginning isn't set up powerfully enough. The beginning has a pretty hefty workload, and must do its work with all appearance of effortlessness.

The beginning of a novel (by which I do not mean the first chapter, but the first third, roughly) needs to:

—hook your reader with a great opening line, opening page, and opening chapter. Provide no pretext for setting the book down. Grab the reader and hold on.

—introduce your characters in what feels like an organic way, and not just introduce them, but establish the connection with the reader. Make the reader care about them.

—introduce the arena of your story, your fictional world, and do so without any offputting amounts of exposition; that’s a trick. But remember, in the very beginning, you don’t really need to explain anything. You might hint at the larger context, but your primary job here is to win the reader’s interest. After you’ve got that, and they’re invested in the story, then you can risk some exposition in possibly chapter two, three, four, but don't leave the reader waiting too long to get grounded. Readers like to know where they are, have something to hang onto. I like to think of it as the difference in inflection in your voice as you ask, "What's going on here?" (intrigued and fascinated), versus "What's going on here?" (irritated and confused). It's a fine line.

—establish an intriguing premise, problem, conflict, or mystery.

—initiate and maintain narrative momentum. That is, get things going right away, and keep them going. Ladies and gentlemen, start your plots!

Got all that? It helps me to think of the scene-craft questions from the last post as I am crafting the beginning of the novel, trying to experience it from the reader's perspective. It's all about crafting an experience for your readers, with intention.

Okay, the dread middle.
Prepping this plotting workshop, I did a quick google on "writing the middle," and this is one of the things that turned up, on an educational website. It made me laugh:

“Fed up with children writing a brilliant beginning to a story and then totally losing it in the middle? To avoid lots of speech, quick endings, or boys killing all their friends off because they don't know what to do with them, try this …”

Yes, resist the urge to kill all your secondary characters. It might be the easiest solution, but it isn't the most satisfying for readers :-)

I also found this, from writer Timothy Hallinan:

“It's kind of a shame there's no way to skip writing the middle of a novel. Writing would be much easier if only readers would settle for a crack-up beginning, then a nicely typeset page that says something like, “Then a bunch of stuff happens,” followed by an absolutely slam-bang ending.

But they won't. They've shelled out for that book, or gone all the way to the library to get it, and they want a middle. It's unreasonable, but there it is.

You have to write the damn thing.”

Yes, you have to do it. I recall that when I embarked on writing Blackbringer in earnest, I had never made it deeper into a novel than a few chapters, and the few times I’d tried, this is what had tripped me up. I didn’t know how to fill up an entire book with things happening. How did authors do that??? Blackbringer was really my novel-writing crash course, my “learn by doing,” and I wrote a lot of stuff that did not make it into that novel. At first it felt like wild floundering. I didn’t know my characters, I wasn’t sure of my plot, dialogue felt so forced. It was not all that fun.

But I kept at it, just kept writing scenes, accepting that there was a good chance they wouldn’t be for the actual book, but just might exist for the sole purpose of making my characters and world real to me. And it worked. I already talked about character and plot being intertwined, and here’s where it becomes totally real. To repeat what I said last time: once you have a fully realized character with genuine motivation, plot happens! Which is not to say it’s always easy, but it no longer feels like trying to pull a rabbit out of a very empty hat.

When you’ve set your story on a course toward a goal, and you know your characters, and you are at home in your fictional world, things actually start to happen. It’s the coolest thing.

I find that it’s really hard to convey this in the abstract. I can talk about it in the context of my own books, which you may or may not have read, but it’ll give you an idea. In Silksinger, one of the main characters, Hirik, is a young mercenary who guards a dragonfly caravan in its travels over the vast and treacherous Sayash Mountains. I had his motivation down—it’s a powerful motivation—but I struggled with creating scenes to bring him to life and flesh out the plot, because I didn’t yet know the texture of his world. It all felt thin and insubstantial.

So I did a lot of brainstorming about his world, specifically, life for the faeries and hobgoblins who travel these routes. Writing is always the act of creating something from nothing, and when you’re writing fantasy this is at its most extreme, because you have to construct the whole world first.

Brainstorming is my best friend. It’s a vast field to play in. You can come up with anything at all, however wild or improbable, and keep what you like and cast the rest aside. And I came up with all kinds of details that began to make the caravan life feel real to me. The cast of other characters, the food they ate, the way they talked, their superstitions and pecking order, all of that stuff. I had fun with it! And a lot of it is stuff that never gets explicitly mentioned in the text, but I had to know it in order to build scenes within an imaginary world.

Once I had a grasp of my world, I started freewriting some scenes. Freewriting is not my best friend. It’s more like the virtuous cousin I know I should like but I really want to kick in the shins. Freewriting is every bit as important as brainstorming to me in the pursuit of creating something from nothing, it’s just harder. But I make myself do it, and it pretty much always works. So I wrote a scene, in the spirit of not being attached to the outcome. And I came up with Hirik’s introductory scene that way, and it was actually fun to write, and natural! I spent some time with my secondary characters, and they totally stepped up and started interacting and they turned out to be jerks, which was awesome; it gave me conflict, and out of conflict came subplots -- subplots!!! -- which enriched the plot and gave me new opportunities to explore my themes.

Soon after that, Hirik’s path crossed with the other main character’s, Whisper, and I started hitting the main “beats” of my story.

This is a term I absorbed only recently: BEATS. I got it from my friend Stephanie Perkins, who I believe got it from her kick-ass editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel at Dutton. I already thought of my plots in terms of moving from one important moment to the next, but I didn’t have a term for my important moments, and now I do. (Thank you!)

The middle of your novel is a series of beats. Each beat is a scene or a grouping of scenes, and you use them to ratchet up tension and mystery and suspense, building and building and building as you compel your character and reader forward. It helps me to have several solid beats to work toward and build around, so the middle stops feeling like this big squishy nebulous blob.

And here is the place to talk about another crucial plot element: pacing, or the speed with which you usher your reader through the beats. You have to pace your beats. You build toward a beat, then it happens, then you trail away from it, transitioning gracefully to your build toward the next one. Think of a roller coaster, how there’s that big build as your car is being towed up to the zenith before the first big drop. All that time, you’re anticipating the drop. Anticipation is every bit as important as the big moment it heralds, and sometimes more important. Anticipation = page-turning. If you just slam the reader with an unexpected beat, you’ve lost an opportunity to lure them through some pages. Of course, there is a place for surprising the reader, just be careful about pacing. Too few beats and the story gets lethargic. Too many, and it gets kind of insane. Have you ever read a book that slammed you so relentlessly with Big Events that soon, nothing seemed Big anymore? Too much !Crisis! and you'll desensitize your reader, which you don't want to do. You're tendering them up for your big moments, so they are putty in your hands!

There should be a steady build toward each beat, with the whole body of the novel being a steady build toward the main beat, or climax.

The middle of a novel should:
—build the tension of your central conflict; raise the stakes
—get your character progressively deeper in crisis
—set up for the climax
—deepen your character relationships
—develop your themes

If the beginning is a showhorse that prances and dazzles, then the middle is the drafthorse, doing the heavy pulling. Here you build, deepen, develop. I know middles can be intimidating, and the ways I have learned to build middles are:

—know your characters; get them talking to each other, get them doing stuff. Scenes will happen. Also, know your world. Seemingly insignificant details can lead to scenes.

—don’t be precious; try lots of scenes without being attached to necessarily using them. Think of it like an artist doing sketches. They’re essential to the end result, even if nobody but you ever sees them, and if you don’t do them, you’ll probably never hit on that perfect composition.

—brainstorm. Come up with a zillion ideas. Know the texture of your world; know way more than you’ll ever be able to fit into the narrative. It gives you a solid place to stand as you build your story. (In that Hirik scene I mentioned, it was what they ate on caravan that was the seed of the scene, and it took on life from there.)

—freewrite. Just do it, yo.

—have a sense of the beats of your story

Whew. That's a lot. Lucky for you, I don't have a lot to say about endings!

Endings
If you’ve done well so far, in an ideal world, the ending might come naturally. (Or it might not.) Here is the place where you:
—solve your mysteries
—establish your characters’ growth/change as a result of the story events
—wrap up your themes, make your point(s)
—resolve your conflict and craft your denouement, the aftermath of your climax, and here you need to choose whether you’re going to give the reader what they want, or not, or some but not all.

The last thing I’ll say is to recommend you read your favorite books and analyze them for plot and structure. Take note of the beats and pacing, and how the author is manipulating you (in a good way) as you read. And look at your own work in progress and really be intentional about everything. You’re both God and Director; it’s all up to you, and a well-structured novel doesn’t [usually] happen by accident. So go forth and plot!

* * *
[sidebar on scene-craft]

"Weaving and Embroidery"

I will generally know going into a scene what has to :
a) happen in it
b) be conveyed in it.

A scene operates on at least two levels, the uppermost being the straightforward: what is happening? And over the course of all this happening, there are subtler things I’m trying to convey: theme, backstory, character development, and I try to find organic ways to embed them in the scene through dialogue, interaction, reaction, etcetera.

I think of these two levels as "weaving" and “embroidery.” This is one of my super-nerdy writing analogies. When Jim and I went to Turkey about ten years ago, we bought a rug, as 98% of tourists do. Well, the kind we bought is called a "gigim", which is basically a loom-woven kilim that is then embroidered. When we went to Chiapas a couple of years ago and bought Mayan textiles, same thing: hand-woven cloth that is then embroidered. And I've long thought of scene-craft in this way.

The things that are physically happening in the scene are the weave of the plot—the long warp threads, the cross weft threads. That provides the matrix for everything else you might "embroider" into it to give it richness and decoration.

What I like about this idea is that it makes it okay to do the basic weaving first—get down the basics of what’s happening, and them come back with your embroidery needle after the fact and add the layers of richness and depth, theme and development. If I had to get all my themes and subtext and subplots perfectly woven in with the warp and weft, I’d go crazy and fail miserably. The great thing about writing is that it is not performance. You don’t have to ever get it right all together in one go. And that goes for plot in general. There is never a reason you have to be afraid. No one is watching!

[end sidebar]
* * *

Well, I think that's all I have to say about plot for now, which is a good thing, because what I really need to be doing right now is working on my w.i.p.! Cheers!

PLOT -- Part II: Character, Motivation, and Conflict!

2010-04-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

[part I of PLOT -- What is Plot? HERE]

I argued last time that your readers' basic needs (akin to food, shelter, and love) are: connection, enjoyment, and satisfaction. So what does this have to do with plot? Well, while you craft your plot, you are trying to meet those needs.

First, let's take connection. For connection, you need, foremost, a character or characters to care about, and better yet: a character who your reader wants to be. I think that the most beloved books are the ones that do this most effectively; they also end up getting the most fan fiction, because the readers want back into the world and the character so badly they’ll take themselves there if they have to. Take Pride and Prejudice. Why are there so many literary sequels? Because women want to be Elizabeth Bennet, and be loved by Mr. Darcy. To be passionately loved by someone amazing, that is a prime fantasy to tap into to make a connection with your reader.

Another is the "unlikely hero". Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, two beloved fantasy characters: both seemingly small and powerless, and both proving, over the course of excellent plots, that they are equal, against all expectation, to the extraordinary role that Fate has thrust upon them. For any reader this is heady. For children, quintessentially small and powerless, this is a dream they will want to inhabit.

So strive to create characters who readers will want to be. Think about the things that have this effect on you as a reader. What are they? What are the set-ups, the situations, the character-types? My ultimate wish as a writer is to write books that readers yearn to climb inside of, and the first and most direct way to do this is through a potent connection with character.
There is a saying, “Character is plot, and plot is character.” I don't know who said it, but wherever it comes from, it’s true. I said before that plot is: your characters living their way through the story.

To take that to the next level, your plot is created and driven by your characters’ desires and actions, so one of the most elemental things to a strong plot is:

What do your characters want? It is essential that they be driven by a powerful motivation. I took a workshop with the writer Dan Greenburg at an SCBWI conference, and he said, “Characters must have a desperate goal that is continually thwarted.” And he said, “Never let your character forget his motivation or stop acting on it. And, never stop blocking him. The author is a rascal, rooting for his protagonist even while thwarting him.”

Out of your characters’ motivations, and the things you cook up to thwart them, you build your plot.

Here is a secret: When you have fully realized characters with genuine motivation, plot happens naturally!

(Really. It's so cool.)

And here’s something to consider. In all of my books and stories so far, it is not the motivation of the protagonist that creates the plot. It is the motivation of the antagonist. In adventure, horror, and fantasy that’s often the case. In other genres, maybe less so. The villain wants something and sets about getting it, or making it happen. The main character wants the opposite, and here you have another essential element of every plot:

Conflict.

You must have a compelling conflict. What is it? Who wants what, and what’s in the way? In Harry Potter, Voldemort wants to return, and Harry must thwart him. In the Lord of the Rings, Sauron wants to return, and Frodo must thwart him. You see there, at the most basic level the plot is the same, it’s what you do with it that turns it into a novel.

In Pride and Prejudice the plot is protagonist-driven. The two eldest Bennett sisters hope to marry well and also for love (that’s their motivation), and all manner of things thwart them, including themselves (conflict), until at last they get a happy ending (conclusion). One of those lists of basic plots claims seven basic plots, and they are: Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. the Environment, Man vs. Machines and Technology, Man vs. the Supernatural, Man vs. Self, and Man vs. God/Religion. What all of those plots have in common is the versus. They all hinge on conflict.

What is your conflict? Know it, develop it, make sure it’s compelling and believable and strong enough to build your entire novel on, because it’s your foundation.

I’d been working on Blackbringer for a few months, maybe, and I didn’t know exactly where it was going. I was still figuring out the plot and my intentions and I was flailing a little. I realized I hadn’t decided on a conflict, and once I zeroed in on that, and put my mind to that, everything started to click into place.

I said earlier that the readers’ basic needs are: connection, enjoyment, and satisfaction. Character motivation and conflict are integral to all three of these things.

—Your connection with your character depends upon believing in the motivation and being compelled by the conflict.

—enjoyment comes from losing yourself in an exciting and rich tale, which is driven by the ups and downs of conflict.

—and satisfaction is the result of a denouement, or resolution of conflict, in which the characters get or don’t get what they want. The denouement is the events after the climax and before the actual ending. In Blackbringer and Silksinger I have classic denouements, with the large cast of characters being dealt with in turn, a sort of: where are they now and where are they headed? I had great fun writing those parts. The tricky business of the climax was past, now I got to play, and a big part of the play is the pleasure of giving the readers what they want (or at least most of it), that sense of satisfaction that makes them close a book with a feeling of yum. That heavy-lidded, just ate a delicious meal yum.

But here I am leapfrogging ahead to endings before I have talked about beginnings and middles! So, next up: Structure. Next time!

* * *
[sidebar on scene-craft]

Crafting the Reader's Experience
There’s a handful of questions I keep in mind as I’m writing, and they pertain to the reader’s experience at any given moment. As a writer, you are crafting the reader’s experience, every step of the way, and these are things I ask myself in an effort to keep the reader where I want them.

The questions are:

—What do I want my reader to know?
How much information am I doling out to them? Every single thing they think and feel while reading is shaped by me. Do they understand fully what’s going on, or are they only seeing a mysterious piece of it? Do they know more or less than the character knows, or do they know exactly what the character knows? This is something to play with for effect. When the reader knows something the character doesn’t, or vice versa, you can use that to build suspense.

—What do I want the reader to wonder?
What is the mystery or suspense at this particular moment? What is keeping them turning the pages? There must always be unanswered questions and/or unresolved narrative threads. I read a book recently, a bestselling thriller called The Girl Who Played With Fire, and there was a mention early on of an incident in the protagonist’s childhood that she referred to only as "All the Evil," and you don’t know what it is, and you really really want to find out, and it isn’t revealed until very late in the book. And that is one of the ways an author keeps you turning pages, with a mystery.

Always remember: if you’re gearing up to resolve one of your page-turner mysteries, or if you’re tying up a suspense thread before the end of the book, you have to introduce new ones first, or you lose your grip on the reader. It’s like you have them on a fishing line and you’ve been steadily reeling them in and reeling them in and then bam, just like that you let them go flopping back out again. You must keep them wondering, keep them reeled in. Never give them an easy place to stop reading.

—What do I want the reader to hope for?
What does the protagonist want? The reader needs to be manipulated into wanting it too.

—What do I want them to fear?
What is at stake? Something must be at stake. In Pride and Prejudice, what’s at stake is Lizzy’s entire future. Will she be lucky enough to marry for love? In Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, we fear the death of beloved characters, and bigger than that, we fear the ascendancy of true evil. Whatever is at stake, it must loom over your novel, like a shadow when a cloud drifts in front of the stun, and all your scenes must be crafted so the reader remains ever-mindful of its presence.

These questions are about scene-craft. You want to be in conscious control of everything your reader thinks, feels, knows, wonders, hopes for, and fears.

[end sidebar]
* * *

Remember: The secret is that once you have a fully realized character with genuine motivation, plot happens naturally!

[part III of PLOT -- Structure HERE]

PLOT -- Part I: What is plot?

2010-04-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the wonderful Western Washington SCBWI conference, I thought I'd share here my notes for the Plotting workshop I gave the other day. Plot is something that people ask me about a lot, and I find it is a hard thing to talk about in the abstract. I mean, you can talk in either the most basic, generic terms, or you can be really specific and talk about plots of particular books, etc. But I wanted to find something in between, a way of discussing plot that would be useful to people working on their own novels -- that's always what I strive for in my workshops. I want people to leave with a new way of looking at their w.i.p. and be itching to get back to work.

The below thoughts on Plot are the beginning of something I am sure I will spend much more time contemplating, refining, over the years. I love to think/write/talk about the writing process, and here is my first crack at tackling PLOT. Whew!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What is plot? Is it really this most basic thing? Yes: it is! Plot is the answer to the question, What happens?

There’s another elementary question we ask about stories and that is, What is it about? And that’s not exactly plot. That question tends to premise and theme. If someone asks me what Blackbringer is about, I might answer: it’s about a faerie who hunts devils. That’s the premise. Or I might say: It’s about personal responsibility and claiming our own power. That’s one of the themes. But plot is: the sequence of events over which the premise and themes play out.

Plot is: your characters living their way through their story.

Our job as plotters is to come up with a sequence of events that allows our characters to live with range and vitality, through ups and downs, suspensefully, and culminating in some kind of satisfying growth or victory or accomplishment, while along the way providing ourselves opportunities to flesh out our themes and make the book as rich as possible.

Author Sarah Waters said, “Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.”

Sarah Waters’s fairground ride, her carefully planned route and finely engineered pace, is plot.

Scenes are the cellular unit of plot. While plotting we:

1. Craft individual scenes that give us opportunities to show our characters being and doing and interacting.
2. Craft the overall story arc and progression of scenes, how they fit together to tell the story, and how they amp up toward the climax.

* * *
[sidebar on scene-craft]

Narration vs. Dramatization
Much of storytelling is a balance between narration (telling the reader something), and dramatization (showing the reader something). One of many choices we make again and again as writers is when to show and when to tell. You know the old saw, "Show, don't tell." ? Yeah, well, sometimes it is better to tell. There's a place for both. There's a lot of "telling" in Lips Touch (less in my Dreamdark books, but it's still there). Each of the three story introductions is narration.

... This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings. It begins underneath India, on the cusp of the last century when the British were still riding elephants with maharajas and skirmishing on the arid frontiers of the empire. The story begins in Hell.

I'm totally telling the reader what's what here, from a detached perspective. But that's not always the desired approach. Sometimes you need to be closer to the action, closer to the character. For example, at the end of my story Hatchling there is a scene in which Esme gets a kiss. In the original version, this moment existed only as one fragment of a narrative montage, reading, "... Esme got a first kiss of her own ..." That was all! In a line note, Arthur Levine, my editor, wrote: "I think you need to dramatize this moment." And he was right! Though it takes place during the denouement (aftermath of the climax) and is not critical to the main action of the story, it is an important moment. And, it is a potential fun moment for readers. Why jip them? Why not show them the kiss. And so I expanded it into what it is now (p. 261-264). Thanks, Arthur! (Love your editor, writers. Really.)

Another way of looking at narration vs. dramatization is: are you outside the scene peering in, an observer? Or are you inside the scene, living it right alongside the characters, or as the characters? Both are valid ways of writing a scene, but both create a very different feeling in the reader, and are used to different effect. I would argue that any important scene needs to be dramatized, to make the reader feel it. (But it's possible I could persuaded to concede to examples. There are just so many ways to write!)

[end sidebar]
* * *

So we have a definition of plot: the stuff that happens. So, how do you craft a good plot?

You’ve heard it said that there are only seven plots in all of literature, or twenty, or three, or whatever. The exact number is a quibble, but there are few, for the reason that our wants and needs as consumers of story are simple and rather primal, just as our basic needs as human beings are simple and primal: humans need food, shelter, and love (clothing optional depending on climate).

Readers need (this is my own list; you might argue):
--connection
--enjoyment
--satisfaction

... and as it turns out, there are some basic storylines that satisfy these needs in a deep and pure way, which is why most stories are a variant one of a few basic plots. It is, of course, what you do with them that counts. Chekhov said, "There is nothing new in art but talent." It is not necessary to be conscious of these basic plots or your appropriation of them while writing. Much of this will be unconscious -- you could say that plots are part of our collective unconscious -- but you want to understand readers' needs and how to meet them, if you want your stories and books to be loved.

My own goal for my novels is to create books that readers will want to climb inside of and live in, characters that readers will want to be.

Next time: Character, Motivation, and Conflict. Come back soon!

[Plot -- Part II: Character, Motivation, and Conflict]
[Plot -- Part III: Structure]

Back from Seattle!

2010-04-12T22:03:00.001-07:00

We're back from Seattle after another amazing SCBWI conference -- this one was certainly a different experience from all the others, since we had Clementine in tow. I couldn't sit in on workshops (though I could still hear the keynote speeches from the hall), and I was busier than usual, since I delivered my first-ever keynote (yeeee! It went well!), plus a workshop on plotting**, plus doing manuscript critiques. I took barely any pictures -- usually I come home with a full camera card, but not this time. And I retired early each evening to settle Clementine to sleep, so there was much less ~~gossiping~~ socializing :-) Still, it was wonderful, and Clementine was a little perfect pie every single moment. She got her share of attention. How could she not?
My goodness.

She was a little bit of a mini-me on Saturday, with both of us wearing green and pink. Totally unplanned, of course, ha ha. Isn't that cupcake dress great? Thank you, mom, for the awesome Baby Boden stuff! (Do they make that in my size?)

Anyway. Sorry. I can't help it. I talk about Clementine a lot. But the conference was fantastic, as always. The Western Washington chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators is AWESOME. You can read a summary of the talks and workshops at their website HERE. I recommend this conference SO HIGHLY. Go next year. Go! Even if you don't live in Western Washington. Make the journey. (Hi to the lovely [shoot! I'm forgetting your name!!! Elizabeth! Yes, Elizabeth??] who came all the way from South Dakota!)

For us, it was a mix of catching up with some of our favorite people, plus meeting new-favorite people. Here's where I would usually do a long post illustrated with oodles of photos, but I have barely any photos! Dagnabbit. I do however, have this one of dinner last night:
An unofficial post-conference affair for some of us who hadn't yet scooted off to the airport or freeway or wherever. That is, to my left: Elizabeth Law (Publisher, Egmont USA), Jay Asher (author NYT bestseller Thirteen Reasons Why), Matt Holm (illustrator, Baby Mouse), Johanna Wright (author/illustrator of picture books), front row r to l: Suzanne Young (author, The Naughty List), Peter Brown (author/illustrator of picture books), Paul Rodine (children's book agent), Jaime Temairik (illustrator), and Jolie Stekly (YA writer).

And here are the ladies in pink, Clementine and me with Suzanne at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in Wootinville WA where the faculty dinner was held Saturday. Delish.

Of course, we acquired a stack of new books in the conference bookshop (thanks to Secret Garden Books), by faculty members Peter Brown:

and Mitali Perkins:
(I finished reading this last night and it's wonderful. I couldn't put it down!)

I also picked up this picture book by attendees Steffanie and Richard Lorig, who I did not meet. The book is a super-fun read aloud, complete with monkey sounds :-)

**tomorrow: I will give notes from my workshop on Plotting. I wasn't going to. I spend so much time developing my workshops and talks that I like to hoard them for future use at other conferences and events, but I think this is one I will share. So come back tomorrow for a discussion of Plotting Novels.

Ciao! (Now, one of my best friends had a baby last night in far-off Amsterdam, so I am going to be doing art today for a birth announcement. Welcome to the world, Fletcher! You are beautiful!)

See you next week!

2010-04-09T01:08:00.000-07:00

Off to Seattle tomorrow for SCBWI, yay! I do so love an SCBWI weekend. As always, the night before going somewhere, here I am at 1 am trying to get organized: printing out my speech, wondering what to wear while giving that speech (I'm thinking polka dots), etc. Getting sleepy, though.

Have a wonderful weekend. Maybe I'll see you in Seattle?

(P.S. Check out this cool post on p.o.v. in Blackbringer. Thank you, Allyson. Awesome blog!)

Happy Easter from Little Bunny!

2010-04-04T11:08:00.000-07:00

Hope the bunny brings you treats :-) Have a lovely day!

March mini-NaNo, the conclusion!

2010-03-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

Youch, Wednesday again! I'll tell you right now: if you finished your zero draft, you can have my cupcake, because I did not! Arg! So many things have come up in the past couple of weeks, the most recent of which is that Jim is sick (poor sweetie!) so I have Clementine right now instead of it being my work time, which means: quick blog post!

If you met your goal, HUGE CONGRATULATIONS!!!

I really really hope a fair number of you made great progress on your goals this month! I did so-so, but am REALLY READY to recommit and keep moving forward. However, I have to wait until mid-April to really get working again, because I have a number of other things to check off my list first, like finishing up workshop prep for the plotting workshop I'm giving at the SCBWI Western Washington conference (are you coming? You should come!) the weekend after this, not to mention the keynote I will also be delivering (my first keynote!). Sooooooo, without further ado, here's Mr. Linky. Sign in and give a quick status report. In comments, please share your ongoing plans. I loved seeing your progress this month!

Now, for inspiration, HERE is a video that Stephanie mentioned in comments last week (for some reason I couldn't find an embed code). It's great. I want to have that attitude about writing -- wouldn't it be marvelous?

Also, randomly, I came across these ingenious ways of solving one of the world's enduring dilemmas. I'm sure you've faced it, maybe you cope with it every day. ha ha. It is: how to carry your cookies and coffee at the same time??? Never fear. Ingenious minds are on the job! The solution might be the mug (cookie slot included), or it might be cookie cutters!

Enjoy!

New Art Prints Available!!!

2010-03-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

All that painting I've been doing in the wee hours of the night, well, here is the result, a new look for Laini's Ladies, which after five years in the marketplace I thought were ready for an overhaul (though the traditional LL line will remain). The basic idea is the same -- ladies with quotes -- but the look is quite different. They involve a lot more paint and actual hand-making and less digital. Fun! Here are four, and I'm not sure right now what direction they will go in as far as development into a manufactured line (that is under discussion), but I am making them available in MY NEW ETSY SHOP as 11x14 prints!

Here they are:
The quote reads: "I am so happy, I cannot be contained in the world. I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of gardens." - Rumi
Quote reads: "Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you." - Hafiz (And on her palm is the tiny greeting, "Hi!."

Obviously "happy" is a big theme for me right now. I can't help it. I'm all about the happy. I just love the word "happy." (Jim proposed it as a baby name, and though I did have a good friend in college named Happy Hawkes, and I do think it is an adorable name, I wasn't sold on it.)
Quote reads: "Those who never risk themselves never fully become themselves." - Alexandra Saperstein

Quote reads: Alis volat propriis -- She flies with her own wings." (which happens to be the Oregon state motto, how cool is that? I do love my state :-) Note, in the above image -- doh! -- the Latin is misspelled, but will quickly be remedied! Never fear.

So there they are, my recent late-night art experiments! If you're interested in having one (or more), they are up on MY NEW ETSY SHOP.

Cheers!

March mini-NaNo, one week to go!

2010-03-24T08:37:00.001-07:00

Oh coffee, oh my coffee, oh I am so tired. Very little sleep had last night. It's not Clementine's fault entirely. I do keep staying up to the wee hours painting, knowing full well a certain baby has no intention of sleeping in in the morning. But I must have those wee hours if I'm going to get anything done. But then I'm a zombie in the morning. A zombie with coffee breath (which, I suppose, is better than a zombie with brain-breath, which is the usual flavor of zombie breath, right?)

So, how did it go this week, writers??? We only have one week left, but I'm telling you right now that I, at least, will be rolling this over into April, and probably into May as well. (And June, July, etc etc.) Join me if you will. My week was decent. Words were written, progress made. It was also a week full of distraction and other pressing work, and it could have been more inspired, but that's how it goes. I suppose painting leeched off some of my writing inspiration, proving that there is only a finite amount of creative energy in any given day. No, actually, I don't think that is true. How much creative energy is there in a day? For me it depends on how the work is going. If it's going well, the energy is infinite. Like Salman Rushdie's Haroun & the Sea of Stories, it is like opening a faucet that connects to an ocean. It'll just keep coming and coming. But if the work falters, if the work dares to suck, then the energy wanes. What is finite though is TIME.

Tell me how you're doing. It's such a great motivator to know you're plugging away too!

Here's this week's Mr. Linky. Let's all set reasonable but ambitious goals for this week, and really kick our butts to meet them. Yes? Determine a reward for yourself in advance. Hm. What's my reward going to be if I meet my goal? Cupcake? Day off for a hike in the Gorge? (gee, which one of those is healthier?) How about bringing cupcakes on a hike in the Gorge? Yeah, that sounds great! Okay, that's my self-bribe. You?

Now, for inspiration this week, some quotes from the great Ray Bradbury:

"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what your write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."

"You fail only if you stop writing."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality can not destroy you."

and one from Rumi:

"Come, come, whoever you are.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come. Come again. Come."

Theirs was a forbidden love . . .

2010-03-21T12:42:00.001-07:00

Clementine has a lot of toys, a plethora of teething rings, a population of dolls, etc etc. She has teethers made in France that are scented with vanilla. She has hand-made wooden toys from Germany. She received a doll from the Netherlands yesterday, with the word "lief" (love) embroidered on it (thank you, Auntie Lori!) She has a lot of neat stuff. Can you guess what it is she wants to chew on? Hm? Can you? You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

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Nothing can quite compare to the metal clip end of her pacifier leash. Yep. The metal clip that is supposed to attach to her clothes somewhere so her toys don't fall on the floor. Yeah. The metal clip is her favorite thing. Followed closely by . . . can you guess? The tag on any toy or blanket. Tags are awesome. Oh, and crinkly waterproof bibs? Endlessly amusing. It's hilarious that we spend all this money on fancy toys, when really, the simplest things are the most coveted.

Oh, and did I mention, she's got two new teeth?
Ha ha ha! I love the way those big yellow beads look like teeth. I've gotten much enjoyment out of that sight :-)

Yesterday I had a major case of mom-endorphins. I was just so happy I was almost giddy. It may have had something to do with the sunshine and warmth, in combination with a healthy dose of this:
It was a beautiful day here in Portland (alas, today the rain is back), the warmest of the year so far, I think it was into the 70s. Clementine and I went over to Alberta St and walked around, and it was bustling with folks and dogs and friendly eccentrics on weird bikes, as usual, and we sat at an outdoor table where I drank iced coffee and Clementine reclined on my lap like a little queen and watched the world and smiled at passersby. It was warm enough for bare toes, even, such a treat, and it was just So. Nice. I got kind of blissed out. She nursed and fell asleep in my lap and there's just nothing like cuddling a sun-warmed, sleeping baby. When we got back to the car, I didn't want to surrender her to her car seat so I just sat there for a while, nuzzling her fuzzy little noggin. I'd barely gotten any sleep the night before (another crazy painting night), but I wasn't tired. Just happy.

Lovely lovely.

What brought us to Alberta was to buy a gift certificate at Bolt, the darling fabric store. I walked in, C. in her Ergo, drooled over the Anna Maria Horner fabrics, and announced to the clerk, "I'm here for a gift certificate, but I am dying to learn how to sew." Which I am. Have been forever. It's one of those things I say wistfully All. The. Time. "I need to learn how to sew." Well. It turns out I'd come to the right place! Affiliated with Bolt, a new sewing studio just opened on Alberta, Modern Domestic, and it's a darling little storefront with brand-new sewing machine stations where they teach classes and have free sewing time with "sewists" on hand to help you. (How much better is the term sewist than "sewer" by the way? So much better!) Anyway: AWESOME! Well, they had a basic class TODAY. Starting 5 minutes from now, in fact. And I really really wanted to do it. Around midnight last night I was still trying to decide, and I realized that it was LUDICROUS to even consider it. I am so swamped right now! What was I thinking???? Taking on a new craft/hobby right NOW??? Total insanity. So here I am, at home, safe from new hobbies for another day. It's just, eesh, there is so much to do and I want to do it ALL!!

I want to have a rich life with my family and friends, write my books, paint my pictures, spend glorious quality time *doing nothing with particular enthusiasm*, travel, knit, sew, cook, exercise, hike, and have a lovely garden to play in. And it just isn't really all possible. Today, after yesterday's endorphin rush, I'm feeling a little bit glum about that. I want want want want want. I'm greedy for life, for everything, all the different lives I could be having -- but all of them at once, without having to choose. But choices must be made, and it hurts.

Blogs kind of make it worse, because I surf around and there are blogs for all the lives I'm not living -- travel, cooking, craft, photography, lovely lifestyle, garden, etc etc. And I want to somehow be able to do/be/have ALL of it.

*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*want*

I'm feeling very wanty today. Sigh. More to say on the subject but -- shockingly!! -- no time just now to say it. Cheers. Happy Sunday :-)

March mini-NaNo, half way! + Thoughts on Zero Drafts

2010-03-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

What? It's Wednesday again? How did that happen . . . *looks around distractedly*. Seriously. HOW? Ah well. Another week of life has flown by, with me groping ineffectually after its tail feathers as it passed. This week LEFT ME BEHIND. You know how some weeks you climb onto and ride like . . . an ostrich, or a unicycle? They carry you along, wind in your hair, and you reach the new week like it's a bus stop (ostrich stop, unicycle stop) and you're perfectly on time, impeccable in your crocheted Barbie traveling suit?
And other weeks roar right past you like those stupid redneck ATVs, spewing sand in your face, and you flail blindly and tumble down a sand dune and lay moaning at the bottom, while seagulls peck at you to see if you're delicious? Yeah. Well. You can probably guess what kind of week I've had! (And yes, thank you, I have it on good seagull authority that I am delicious.)

And NO, I did NOT meet my goal. I can't believe you asked. Sheesh. That's so mean. Just rub it in why don't you. Here, here's the salt shaker. Throw some salt in there while you're at it. And I suppose you are sitting smugly atop a mountain of pages, licking an ice cream cone with just the very tip of your tongue, gloating? Well, goody for you. Goody.. This is for you:

Ha ha. Sorry. I am REALLLLLLLLY happy for you! Really. No. Really. I am. I genuinely hope you all had splendid writing weeks. The fact is, I did have a highly productive creative week, but my energies were channeled into the unexpected art burst that I mentioned in my last post. It's Laini's Ladies related and it's important -- a whole new look for Laini's Ladies, about which I am really really excited, the kind of excited that makes you NOT GET TIRED, not even at 2 am. I've been up painting, listening to books on tape, and have to make myself go to bed. It's kind of wonderful! I did get some writing done too, but not as much as I wanted, and not every day, which is stupid, because when you skip a day or two, you know what happens. You lose your momentum, forget where you were, and have to go rereading stuff to catch up, which takes away precious time for actual writing. Plus, when you're writing a fast draft, you don't really want to reread that stuff, because its awfulness is painful. It makes me wince. I read it like this:
(That's not really me.)

So. Without further ado, let's have a sign-in for next week. In the comments, tell how you did and what you're planning to keep yourself inspired this coming week.

For my part, I need to get back on the ostrich.
My goal? Hm. How about . . . 6000 words? And writing every morning, so I don't lose my place. That's my commitment.

And now, some thoughts on . . . the Zero Draft:

I think the first place I ever heard the term "zero draft" was in the Terry Pratchett interview in The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Fantasy Writers, by Leonard S. Marcus. To the question, "Do you revise your work?", Pratchett answered:

"My work goes through five drafts. Draft Zero is something I would never show anyone! Draft One is me telling the story to myself once I think I know how it goes. Draft Two is me telling the story to my editor. Draft Three is what we end up with. And Draft Four is what I call sanding and polishing--when the spell-checker comes into play and I'm working on the fine detail of a sentence."

And I liked it, the idea of a draft so raw it doesn't even get a number (Okay, nerds, fine, so zero is a number. Whatever.), it isn't even really considered a draft. It's certainly nothing you'd ever show anyone. I mean, look, Pratchett's first draft is still only for himself; it's not until the second that he shows somebody. The zero draft is a primitive, inchoate* thing, the shadowy silhouette of a beast that has not yet fully come into being. It is a Frankenstein creation still lying on its slab, not yet animated by the spark of life. It is somewhat monstrous, and that's okay. It is supposed to be.

I wrote recently how I'd heard one writer's process was to write a draft and then delete it and start over, and how appalling this was to me, but now I get it. This deleted thing was perhaps a zero draft, a monstrosity. To read it would probably be painful, but the writing of it was necessary to begin to bring it to life, to get it to gel in your head so you could begin to write a first draft.

The beginning of my current book, the first third to half of it, is not a zero draft, but is in various states of polish and persnicketiness. The problem there is that when I shift an idea even slightly, which I am constantly doing, it requires rewriting, much much rewriting, and the more I love the writing of a particular scene, the more I will try to preserve certain lovely phrases, carry them over into the new version. And this takes FOREVER. It's the most painstaking kind of surgery, like transplanting eyelashes onto your Frankenstein. Have you had the experience where you're doing something that requires keeping your hand steady for long periods of time and your hand is just fed up, it just wants to go a little crazy, flap around, clench and unclench, do jazz hands? That's what happens to my mind after a while too. I've known for a long time that the idea of a zero draft makes total sense, but I haven't been so able to DO it, at least not in a long novel. But I am trying it now, and I shudder at its Frankenstein-ness, but still, there are *snicks* every single day, where I figure something out and realize that I have made a breakthrough that will not require any ridiculous eyelash transplant surgery because I had not yet devoted time to fine-tuning something that was not ready for fine-tuning. It's such a relief.

So, are you doing a zero draft? How's it feel? Happy writing, everyone. Happy week!

*(I love the word "inchoate" and am forever trying to find places to use it :-) It dates back to my high school reading of D.H. Lawrence, and having to look the word up, and even then not being sure I quite had a hold of it. It was like trying to hold a fish. Do I know what this word means? I think I do ... no wait, it just escaped! Quick, catch the inchoate before it flops back into the lake! A hallmark of my young writing is over-the-top vocabulary. I spoke that way too, kind of like Oscar Wao. Nerd that I was. And am.)

Right there waiting for me

2010-03-15T01:58:00.001-07:00

I've been slowly easing back into painting over the last several months. It had been a while; it had come to feel very distant. The caps of my oil paint tubes, I imagined, were crusted shut -- an apt symbol for my soul as a painter.

The thing is, though I do art for part of my living, I haven't found I'm able to put the time into both art and writing that I would like. They're both full-time jobs. So though I have continued to create new Laini's Ladies lines several times a year, that has pretty much been the extent of my art-making. I haven't felt inspired; I haven't played, pushed paint around just for the joy of it. I haven't tried new things. Art has begun to feel like "the path not taken," and I find myself wondering where I might be as an artist if I was able to put more energy into it. I don't know the answer to that, but this past week I've found myself possessed by this mad spirit of painting. Man. I've been up until at least 2 every night, one night even 3:30. I don't get tired (until morning, when Clementine wakes up at 6!) I've done a couple of things that I LOVE SO MUCH. I can't wait to show you. But I will wait, a little while longer. I will however give you a peek of my new etsy shop, which is still empty, but you can see in the banner a smidge of the piece that I love.

I'd been just using low-grade craft acrylics, the cheap kind from Michael's, in my recent sketchbook dabblings, and having plenty of fun with those. But there was something -- a face -- I wanted to paint with more control, so I pawed through the oil paint basket to see what was happening in there. It's a three-tiered hanging produce basket, you know, the kind you mostly see in kitchens? And it's full of dusty tubes of paint that haven't been touched in . . . a few years? Turns out, most of the caps open just fine, and there was a new small-size can of odorless turp on the shelf, and an unopened tiny bottle of Galkyd (quick-drying medium), and that is all I needed, and so I painted, and oh my god, oil paint is such a wonderful substance. It is so smooth and buttery and magnificent. I felt like I had never stopped; the paints were right there waiting for me, all this time. Why did I stop? I don't know. Paths not taken. How many paths not taken do each of us have?

Well, it's after 2 am for the fourth night in a row, and I'm going to hit they hay for a few hours of sleep before my adorable alarm clock starts to coo and gurgle :-) In the meantime, a short Clementine video. She's something of a musical instrument, as you will see. She (and we) find it very entertaining when you strum her lip, and you have only to put a finger to her mouth for her to obligingly make a sound so that it can go all . . . strummy. (I don't think I'd know a good word for this even if it wasn't 2 am, but as it is, well, you know what I mean.) Cheers!

March mini-NaNo, one week down, three to go

2010-03-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

[First, some exciting news! The Dreamdark books have sold Turkish rights!!!! Yeeeeeeee!!!! I love Turkey, really really love it. Jim and I went there the summer he asked me to marry him (though the actual proposal came later, in Italy), nearly ten years ago now, and it is the most beautiful shimmering fantastical country -- the minarets and markets, the carpets, the apple tea! We slept in a fairy chimney scooped right out of limestone, for goodness sake. Turkey is magical, and now Dreamdark will exist in Turkish. That is cool beyond words. German, Portuguese, and now Turkish. Yay, Dreamdark! And speaking of translation, the Italian translator of Lips Touch has been in contact. So exciting knowing that is happening now. I am such a nerd for foreign editions. I can't WAIT to see and hold all these and dorkily pretend to read them :-) (Well, the Italian at least I'll be able to pronounce correctly!)]

Okay. Now on to March mini-NaNo! I'm curious how many of the 25 people who signed up last Wednesday will reappear today to check in. Most, I hope. I hope good writing weeks have been had for all! I know life has a way of intruding on well-laid writing plans, oh how I know. But it feels so good to attain a string of goals, one after another. And having a draft of a book at the end of it? Nothing like it. Marvelous.

So, sign into Mr. Linky to recommit for next week's small goal:

I had a pretty good week, and am looking forward to another one. It feels so good to move through the territory of the story. I'd been dwelling in one region of it for far too long, tidying. That starts to get crazy-making after a while. It makes one long for adventure. Sometimes the impetus to move forward in storytelling (in spite of my fears and perfectionism) is best provided by getting utterly fed up with my inertia. It reminds me of this Anais Nin quote:

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Sometimes that's what it's like. The frustration finally overrides the fear and you find yourself -- your usually meek little tidy self -- feeling unruly and restless. Like a monsoon in a box, and all you want to do is knock off the stupid lid and be free and be wild! For those of you who share my particular writing malaise (perfectionism), I have this to say: you only get to that point by relentless butt-in-chair. If you're not actually forcing yourself to sit down to the story and labor with the words, the frustration won't reach the tipping point. Your inner monsoon will not boil over, but will only simmer mildly in the background of your mind.

It may not be the sanest way to write, but sometimes you take what you can get.

So, goals for this week? It's not too late to join in! Someone asked how to sign up? Just jump right into Mr. Linky there and put in a goal for the coming week. Mine is 10,000 words and tackling a particular important part of the story that I'm both excited by and terrified of. And away I go to confront it ...

But wait! One last thing! Are you a Hunger Games fan? Let me go one step further: are you Team Peeta or Team Gale? If, like me, you are the latter, go HERE and vote for Gale! If, like Jim, you are Team Peeta, don't go vote, because Peeta is winning. Come on, people. Gale is obviously Katniss's soulmate! Eesh. He might not be as cuddly as Peeta, but he's hot.

And one last last thing, via Huffington Post:

tee hee.

1st Small Goat

2010-03-09T09:05:00.001-08:00

Hey all March NaNo'ers! Our first small *goat* is almost upon us. How goes it? Tomorrow it'll be time (already!) for another Mr. Linky box, where we can check in with our first small goal and forge forward toward the next one. I hope you're all writing writing writing!!!

I've had some very good days here and some days that were fun (sunshine!!!) but not productive, and yet another day that was productive, but for art (new Laini's Ladies!), not writing. Still, I am going to make my goal tomorrow and I've had a few mornings writing where that best of all possible things happens, where ... you know ... things happen. I've heard it referred to as the magic that occurs between your fingers and the keys of your keyboard, when story appears as if from nowhere and things happen. Marvelous! I am having FUN with my w.i.p. and the story is revealing itself and moving forward, and that is excellent. It's veryvery rough, but whenever I can work rough, I feel proud of myself for keeping my ~~mental illness~~ perfectionism in check. Yay, me!

Need a 20-minute creative inspiration break? Stephanie sent me this link to a T.E.D. talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, and it's really fun. A "sane" way of looking at creativity.

Cheers! Now: back to writing! (You can stop to pet the goat, but only for a minute :-)

P.S. Clementine is 7 months old today. Wow! 7 months!!

March Mini-NaNo Club, thoughts for Friday

2010-03-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

Hi all! Well, Clementine has decided that 6 am is a nice time to wake up and play. It could be worse, certainly.
Here she is, in all her dawn glee, wrapped up in the bed sheet :-) Hopefully we'll get a nap later, but for now, this is just a brief check-in before I get to work on my w.i.p.!

First, for fun, a picture of a serious writer at work, and not just any writer, but the best-sellingest writer in history:
Take it from Agatha: have some dignity while you write! No slumping around in your pajamas, woman! (Just kidding. I'm wearing pink fuzzy slippers right now that match my hair. Most emphatically not wearing a tweed suit.)

Also for fun, this pulled from a slide show I did on, appropriately enough, finishing your novel.
Since we're all setting goals for next week, this is perfect! If you're wondering about the image, the explanation is this: I had the slide show all finished and ready to go (I thought), but luckily I proofed it one last time, because I discovered that this slide (sans image), actually read: Set small goats and meet them. Oops! So here's a small goat I would like to meet. If you're wondering, it's a Kashmir goat. I had not ever thought about where cashmere came from, but there it is: these goats spin it from their butts like spidersilk. Okay, not really, but it does come from these goats!

Also, yesterday the Comic-Con/Wondercon newsletter came in the mail, with a section on writer's advice. I bring you two different approaches. First, from the wildly imaginative China Mieville, very specific advice as to process:

"If you want to write a novel, don't try to stare at it head-on. It is Gorgon: If you meet its gaze it will turn you to stone. Countless wonderful books get not written -- a more intransigent state of affairs that not getting written, by far -- this way. Instead, I recommend writing a book behind your own back. Frontload as much organization as you can -- way more than you think necessary, certainly more than you want to -- plan the whole thing out in detail. Characters, setting, story, in deep detail, so you have an overall arc, an outline of at least a short paragraph for each chapter, what'll happen in it, who's going to do what in it, and where you need to be by the chapter's end. Estimate the book's overall length, very roughly. (In words. Stop thinking in pages, please: in the modern world of font-profusion, let alone the explosion of e-books, it is totally unhelpful to keep saying "I wrote 10 pages today." Ten pages in, what 8 pt. Courier? 17 pt. Centaur? I implore you to think in terms of numbers of words, not "pages.")

Take a good long time over this -- a few good weeks. Then, when it is done, forget it. Don't look at it. That way, when you've finished, you'll have a book-plan, which, paradoxically, will allow you to ignore the terrifying book-ness of the book. Because all you need to focus on is the chapter you're on, and you know what has to happen there, because you've planned it, and it's right in front of you. Forget about the rest of it, just focus on trying to write, say, 500 words (or whatever) on a writing day, and thinking just about the chapter you're in, and getting to the end of it. If you don't do that, everything you write you'll be thinking in terms of "Adding To The Novel," and that's way too intimidating, so there's every possibility you'll stall."

And then, from the other end of the planning spectrum, these words from comic book writer Geoff Johns (and recently named co-president or something or other of DC Comics):

"Stop thinking about writing and write."

Words of wisdom. I didn't know that China Mieville was such a planner, but it makes sense since his books are long and dense and chewy, with crazy world-building skills and lots of characters and man, Perdido Street Station had one of the ickiest wickedest monsters evah. His approach, above, is sort of what I'm up to this month -- I took a chunk of the book and made an outline and I'm taking it on piece by piece. I go in waves of working that way. Sometimes that is called for, and other times I need to "fly into the mist", that is, go forward not knowing, invite serendipity, close my eyes and see what magic appears, see what blossoms. But now I'm on a little planned spree, so we'll see how that goes. And yesterday I met my small "goat" which was section 1 off my new outline. Yay! I love making tick marks on a list. Section one, tick.

Happy wishes to all writers today :-)

(Peter S. Beagle's writing advice in that article, by the way, is very practical: "Invest in a comfortable pad for the chair in which you work." Ha ha. From someone currently sitting on a folded afghan on a hard bench, I can tell you it isn't bad advice! I also happen to be reading Peter S. Beagle's first novel right now, A Fine and Private Place, and I was marveling at it even before I learned the effer wrote it when he was 19!!!!! How-what-really-whuuu??? Seriously: so smart, so good.)

March mini-NaNo Club, come on, you know you want to do it!

2010-03-03T22:15:00.000-08:00

Okay, stalwarts, it's on! March mini-NaNo! Thank you for joining me in the crazy push to get a draft done by the end of the month. A draft. A beginning, a middle, and an end. A big, juicy, messy word-count boost to your work-in-progress. Of course you can start something new if you want to play and are not currently working on a novel. Or you can just vow, as I am, to finish a draft of your w.i.p. by the end of the month!

Amber suggested having a sign-up for accountability, and I think that is a good idea! So sign into Mr. Linky if you're on board. I'll post a new Mr. Linky every Wednesday this month and we can fill in our word counts for the previous week. Sound good? This being the first one, if you want to fill in a word count goal for the week ahead, you can do that. Or just sign up.

In a little bit of mental synchronicity, Jolie at Cuppa Jolie just declared March "Crack Your W.I.P. month" -- she's encouraging you to set an ambitious w.i.p. goal for the month and check in there for support. Somebody even promised red licorice whips to everyone who accomplishes their goal! Nice!

Okay, so there we have it. BIG PLANS FOR MARCH! March is, after all, when NaNo should be. November is a ridiculous month for it. I'm excited: no plans this month, no commitments, just this draft (and, you know, the whole life/family/friends thing, of course, minor detail :-)

So, how have my first few days of this March plan gone? I've written a lot of words, but I have to fess up that it's mostly been brainstorming and notes, but today I had some "snicks" that I think will carry me through . . . until I get confused again. Who, me? What?

So tomorrow real word count starts to get racked up. Excited!!! Good luck, all!

Mission for March & the Baby Food Theory of Process

2010-03-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

As of yesterday I laid a new plan of attack, and I'm speaking it *aloud* here to make it real. (If you don't blog about it, did it really happen?) It is my resolution to write to an ending of a draft of the current novel by the end of March. Yikes.

This will involve using every trick in my writerly tool box, as well as gritting my teeth plenty to endure the suck. It's not my usual M.O., and I've written before how the enforced fast draft doesn't work for me, worse, how it killed my book (a different book, the one I wrote before this one, which has never been read by a living soul, including myself, and which is festering away in a top-secret file). But. This book isn't that book, and I am hereby promulgating a new theory, which I dub:

THE BABY FOOD THEORY OF PROCESS
Having recently started feeding Clementine solids, I have learned that one is advised to try a baby on a particular food multiple times before deciding that they don't like it, because their taste buds change. Well, that's what I'm saying about process too. Maybe process taste buds change! Just because the fast draft of that last book murdered it, doesn't mean the same thing will happen for this book. I'm way too invested in this book for that to happen. (A few people have asked what I'm working on, and I'll just say for now that it is YA, in the vein of Lips Touch, but unrelated, and a long novel, not stories.) But I need major momentum now, helter-skelter dangerous momentum, like pushing a boulder down a hill and then standing back and watching Bambis and bunnies scatter and flee.

Once I read that a writer (I think it might have been Cynthia Leitich Smith, but I could be totally wrong about that) would write a fast first draft and then delete it. GASP! HORROR! And I didn't get that AT ALL. But I can see it now. Because when I write a fast draft of a chapter, I often don't even read it, I just take what I learned in the writing of it, the way the story went, and use that to write a nicer draft, with more attention to craft and pacing. So that's kind of what I'm thinking now for my March mission, only instead of chapter by chapter, I'll barrel through the whole thing, and I will not actually delete the resulting mess (I never ever delete anything, ever), but I may not force myself to reread it.

I am going to get a draft written, by hook or by crook, by the end of the month. I AM. (Asks, in a small voice, "Does anyone want to join me?" Tiny secret March NaNo club?)

* * *

Meanwhile, Jes asked in comments to the last post how I am getting writing done with a widget in my life. Good question! Ever since my pregnancy I've been meaning to do a series of interviews of working-mama-authors and ask them the same thing. I'll start with my own answer, which is: it's largely luck, that Jim and I both work at home and we're able to construct a schedule whereby we each have work time when we're at our best creatively. My best time is the morning (which is why I'm blogging now, snort snort), so I work from around 8:30/9 am to around 1, and then again after Clementine goes to bed (NOT my more productive time, but I'm working on it, because boo hoo hoo for me, you've got to use the time you have!); I have Clementine in the afternoon, from lunchtime to dinner, while Jim works. So that's how we do it.

And can I say how glad I am we can arrange things this way? Neither of us is on baby-duty for so many hours in a row that we get frazzled. It's more like when our turn comes around, we're delighted to see the little bunny and we're totally ready for a work break to take a walk or a nap or play. It's pretty awesome. Of course, we waited until we were old to have a baby, so it's not totally luck. We built our life to be like this, and worked on our careers first so we would be working at home full time.

One of the writers in that Guardian list had as a rule for writers: Don't have children. Well, I don't think one must go that far, but children do make it trickier to work out a writing schedule, that's for sure. They also make life deeply, deeply rich, add whole dimensions to it and to you, and any level of trickiness is worth it. But if you're a young aspiring writer, I would suggest that getting your first few books written (and if possible, published) before starting your family is not a bad idea -- but your life is your life, and you build it yourself day by day, and there are plenty of writers out there who didn't start writing/publishing until after they had children. Do whatever works for you! Find a way.

MAKE a way!

Have a great day!

Expect the Worst!

2010-02-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Guardian posted Part II of their writers' advice lists, and like the first part, there's some great stuff and some ridiculous stuff. Colm Toibin, for example, will allow you to watch Bergman film on Saturdays, but not to go to London, or anywhere else. Whu??? Will Self counsels that if you're writing a contemporary setting, "there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching." Ha ha! Joyce Carol Oates tells us to "expect the worst."

I'm especially fond of Philip Pullman's single curmudgeonly response: "My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work." Ouch!

(What is Philip Pullman working on these days, I wonder.)

I like Sarah Waters' #4:

"Writing fiction is not "self- expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace."

Nice. Ah, writing advice. My advice to myself is to get back to it, right away. As soon as Clementine awakens from her morning nap, I'm on duty. Cheers! oop, there she is now ...

Assorted writing advice and laments

2010-02-25T09:20:00.001-08:00

My mom just emailed me this link to a Salon.com article by Laura Miller, "A Reader's Advice to Writers" on what she, as a reader, who say to writers. There are five pointers, and they're all very good, I think, including one that I find sadly true (#4). You can read her detailed reasons at the above link, but here's the gist:

1. Make your main character want something.

2. Make your main character do something.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting.

4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much.

5. A sense of humor couldn't hurt.

A couple of things about this list. First, as a writer for young people, those first two on the list are majorly "duh". In fiction for young people, it's a given: the character wants; the character does. I imagine Laura Miller is thinking of *literary* novels, broody, introspective intellectual things. (She's in no way addressing children's literature; I don't know if she reads it.)

Jim and Clementine and I had a lovely dinner (of pizza, yum) the other night with Matt Holm and Jenni Holm (creators of, among other things, the Babymouse graphic novels for kids), Matt's wife Cyndi, Jenni's daughter Millie May, and picture book writer Eric Kimmel. (Super fun!)
Well, Eric Kimmel made an interesting comment about how dull sometimes speeches delivered by *grown-up writers* can be (when you're used to hearing kid-lit authors speak), because they haven't honed their speaking skills before groups of kids and teens! I thought that was a really good point. Same with writing, of course. Adult readers might give a book a few more pages to engage them than a kid will. Writers for young people cannot eff around, and they cannot let the story loll, because a fourth grader will think nothing of abandoning a book whenever and wherever it gets boring.

This was reinforced by Jim's recent listening to audiobooks while illustrating -- he went through two fabulous YA sci-fi novels: Feed and The Adoration of Jenna Fox, and then attempted an "adult" title and found the beginning so ponderous and slow by comparison. Of course not all adult books have this problem!!! But. Very very very few books for young readers suffer from this.

But back to Laura Miller's list. Yeah, #4. I know it's true. There are readers like me who really savor the actual prose, along with the story, but I think of the general reading population, it is not so. And I whole-heartedly agree: story is more important than style! But man, I love it when an author does both. Those are the books I keep, recommend, reread, etc. Knowing as I know that style isn't really that important to [most] readers, I occasionally try to detach myself from it in my writing, to ignore it and write more quickly, not taking such care to shape the language as I do (which takes extra time!!!!). But I can't do otherwise than I do. I can only try to work faster within the framework of my brain's natural function. Besides, the tinkering with language is one of my favorite parts of writing!

I really have changed as a reader though. Back in my college days I leaned much more heavily toward style than story ("literatyoor, my good man"). Now I'm on the side of story, but hoping for a little style in there -- like spice for the soup, you know? It's not necessary, but man does it make the soup taste better!

Anyway, I thought it was a good list. Laura Miller also links to this list, put together by the Guardian (which Stephanie also emailed me the other day), including Elmore Leonard's top ten, which I guess is famous writer's advice, but I'd never read it before, and also Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and many more. I like Neil Gaiman's #1: Write. It puts me in mind of Jane Yolen's advice: "Write the damn book," which I really ought to stencil on my wall. And I notice in passing perusal (haven't read these yet) this, by Jonathan Franzen: "It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction." Ha ha! (And what am I doing right now instead of writing my book???? Hm???)

Okay. So that's that. Duly chastened, Jonathan Franzen (who I've never read). Good bye!