What else I might still be...

The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is: WHO else might I still be? I chose to change it to: WHAT else might I still be?

I will be ashes some day. Not for me that strange chemical facsimile of self, reluctant to decompose. It’s not the decomposition that troubles me. Presumably I won’t be there to smell it -- it’s just the real estate of the grave. The living take up enough space in this world. Why cede land to the dead? No cemetery for me and no urn. Just turn me loose, somewhere wild.

But apart from ashes, what else might I still be? Might I be a ghost? I think I would like to be a ghost for a while, to observe the living. I would choose one to follow, like I did one morning in Venice when I woke at dawn and went out to watch the Venetians hurrying to work. They knew all the shortcuts and alleys, all the tiny bridges, and I followed one after another, getting hopelessly lost, getting drawn into the heart of a secret city where real people did plain things, even within those dreamlike palazzi.

As a ghost, I will pass through walls and perch on the tall backs of chairs. I will taste the food on people’s forks as they lift them to their lips. I will listen to their lullabyes and laments, and I will disrupt their televisions so they have to find other ways to spend the evening. With a Ouija board, maybe. I’ll spell them secrets, like who is in love with them, and who is not.

Or might I be a shade? Might I awaken in the antechamber to the afterlife to hear the jolly I-told-you-so’s of Christians as they’re whisked rapturously upward? Might I be left to loll in Purgatory, forever seeing up the skirts of the righteous as they’re hefted to heaven? Maybe. Or are atheists sent down like hooligans to the headmaster’s office? I’ll be surly as a schoolboy. I’ll repeat every sentence the devils utter til they’re gritting their teeth. I’ll say, “I know you are, but what am I?” I’ll hold up two fingers behind their heads like horns whenever a photo is being snapped. I’ll run when I’m supposed to walk, and tapdance when I’m supposed to slouch.

Or might I get a chance to audition for heaven, despite my disbelief? Wouldn’t that be nice, if all the heathen babies didn’t burn in eternal hellfire? Even if I made it through and paradise was wonderful and golden, I would want to sneak back to life and tell people: “You only have to be good!” I would spread the word like an agnostic gospel: Be good and help people. That’s all that matters! (And maybe not telling other people they’re going to Hell looks good on your heavenly resume?)

But what do I really think I will be next, many many years from now? A body whose brain will inevitably fall still, and after that ashes, and then, nothing. It might not be as exciting as ghostlife or tapdancing in hell, but it’s not sad. Life is a beautiful thing, a shimmer, like a thread of spidersilk catching the light. And I think once it’s gone it’s gone, so you should love it all you can and not get caught up in dreaming how important you’ll be in Heaven, and whether God will remember your name or have to be reminded by the angel with the clipboard.

Sunday Scribblings -- very late!!

I posted last week's Sunday Scribblings prompt right before racing out of town for a week, so I'm really really late with it, but I'm determined not to miss any! The subject was "Who I might have been" and it could be interpreted many ways, but I'll stick with just telling what made me think of the prompt in the first place.

I caught part of a program on PBS about a young Danish aviatrix who flew a teeny tiny plane from Denmark to Kabul in 2002. It was quite an amazing story. She set off on this journey because of a documentary she'd seen on TV in which school children in Afghanistan right after the fall of the Taliban were talking about what they want to be when they grow up. Well, one young girl said she wanted to be a fighter pilot. Perhaps it was the great unlikelihood of that dream coming true that prompted the aviatrix to plot her journey -- I don't know. I suspect it was the journey itself that settled into her soul, and the little girl at the other end was just sort of punctuation to the adventure. At least I hope so. Because after an incredible series of flights in her really very small plane, against all odds and without the permission of the US military, she arrived in Kabul. She met the girl and took her flying. And, well, the girl didn't really seem all that keen on being a pilot after all. Wah-wah-wah.

It wasn't the most uplifting finale to a documentary, but it was so REAL. Imagine if when you were twelve some stranger in a faraway land overheard you say what you wanted to be when you grew up, and then staged a daring journey to come and help you fulfill your dream. Well, that's awesome, but... when I was twelve I wanted to be pathologist for a while, and I'm really glad no one flew around the world to teach me how to perform an autopsy!

What does this have to do with the Sunday Scribblings prompt? It was just the Afghan girl's life that got me thinking. She had a loving and supportive family, including a father who wanted her to succeed -- she had it better than a lot of girls in Afghanistan. She wasn't being sold to an eighty-year-old mullah to be his sixth wife. But she was still a young girl in Afghanistan and as such, her options were very limited! Even if someone miraculously flew a plane into her city just to help her fulfill her dreams, would she know what to do with that? Dream-following takes practice. You can't really spring it on someone and expect them to know just what to do, to show up on time for their dream-following appointments! Some people are born with the miraculous inner resources to grab onto their opportunities, but not everyone. Not MOST people.

How about me? I'd like to think I have those inner resources, but how can I know? I've been lucky to the point of blessed. I mean, I'm not from a rich family, but a loving family who always supported my dreams. I never had to listen to any uncles telling me I would shame the family by being seen in an airplane!! I distinctly remember the point in my life when I realized how foolish it was to believe everyone should be expected to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." I let go of my Ayn Rand-inspired teenage elitism and opened my mind a little.

When I was 17 I lived in Paris for three months and all my French friends were card-carrying members of the Communist party. Really. That was something out of the 1950's to an American teenager in the late '80s. Communism was a historical failure, right? Queuing for toilet paper and all that? But to my French friends it was the principle that people deserve a level playing field, that not all humans are born with the tenacity and strength and intelligence to fight their way out of poverty and just because someone's not a genius, do they deserve misery? Shouldn't society take care of its citizens? So simple!

I'm not saying I converted, but the arguments surely did wonders for my French -- there was a memorable weekend manning a crepe booth at "La Fete de l'Humanite," a kind of Communist carnival outside of Paris, when my language skills were put to task defending my country! (Something I wouldn't attempt in France now even in ENGLISH.)

I'll write a bit about the Children's Book Conference Jim and Alexandra and I have been at in a day or two. Cheers! Hope everyone is doing well!

More Show & Tell

Here's a mock-up of the cover of my book!! I didn't think I'd be able to show Jim's awesome artwork for a while, but the art director just gave him the go-ahead to post it on his website, so I figure, it's fair game. Isn't it gorgeous? I think the lettering will probably change, but this is basically it. I LOVE it! (Jim isn't a very active blogger, but I know he'd love to get some comments about this cover, if you happen to find your way to his blog.)

I've been having kind of a hard time keeping up with blogs lately, what with work and summer stuff like family trips, and I'm looking forward to the Northwest rains to return and keep us housebound in a cloudy grey coccoon. I do love the Oregon rain! I love the smell of it, the sound of it on the roof and windows, and I love the green it brings. Not so green now. Bring on the rain, sky gods! I love the calm of winter, coffee in the kitchen, long days of writing wrapped in a warm sweater... sigh... Come on, rain!

PS - Apropos of nothing, my ridiculous shoe order was delivered today and har har har, the joke's on me. They're high alright. Hoo boy. One pair in particular is so absurd. ABSURD. It's the middle pair, if you care to know. Those of you who wondered how I walk in such shoes? Actually, they're quite steady -- that's not the problem. Walking in them is kind of like walking with overturned buckets strapped to your feet! You're not going to tip over or turn an ankle, but dang, your feet weigh about 20 pounds each! I'm not sure if I'm going to return them or keep them for dress-up (the Halloween kind, not the date night kind). But the other two pair are wearably absurd, I think. I'll take some photos of them in action!

Holiday Laini's Ladies

It might still seem a little early to be showing holiday designs, but I have been very restrained about it -- I did these designs back in January! As with publishing, so too with gift products: you work several seasons, if not years, ahead of time -- It takes some getting used to. I'm working on Valentine's and Mother's Day right now, in fact. I waited to post these designs until the manufacturer, Bottman, could show them at their summer gift shows, and that time is now. So here they are! They'll be available as ornaments, greeting cards, and gift tags:





And this pair is kind of its own little set, with the birdies and all:


These will be in stores in the fall, and can also be found here. Also, when I was at the coast this weekend I saw that my 2007 desk calendars are out in some stores. Yay!

Sunday Scribblings; Two Cents

I have been out of town all weekend and so haven't been able to read any of the new Sunday Scribblings responses. I DO see however, that the site was the Yahoo pick of the day yesterday. Yay, us!

I'm quite glum today and approaching a stretch of treacherous overwork that will cause me to seem to disappear from the universe, but I haven't missed a Sunday Scribble yet and don't plan to. So I'm going to sort of unhinge my forehead and see what spills out:

Two cents. I don't know where the expression comes from, but to me in my current state, two shiny pennies in a pocket in no way sums up the need to GIVE MY OPINION. It's more like a sulfur-spewing dragon perched on my shoulder, threatening to incinerate anyone who comes too close. Pennies? They seem so sweet and inoffensive, like something Laura Ingalls got in her Christmas stocking, along with a stick of candy and an orange. When the need to share my thoughts builds in me... it's like a Hindenburg waiting to happen. But I don't WANT to be that person, the explosive know-it-all -- who likes an explosive know-it-all? -- so I try to bite it back. I let the conversation play and replay in my head (or, as the case may be, in my email, carefully unaddressed so I don't hit "send" by accident!) and I'm always so much more clever in my head, with no one snapping back. Often these little theatrical dialogues in my mind are all I really need, an outlet to diminish the fury of righteousness that has built up in me. Then, having triumphed in this scene of my imagining, I can proceed in a much more charitable way to address whatever real issue exists. Dragon temporarily tamed.

Right now, as it happens, my dragon is suffering the indigestion of swallowing too much of its own sulphur, because you know, you can't always say what you want to say. Sometimes the pennies have to stay in your damn pocket. I recall how blithely I would "fire" customers when I worked retail as a teenager, giving my 2 cents as if it was my duty to point out to people how unsophisticated and simple they were. (Ah, bookstore clerks! How superior they think themselves!) Later, working for myself: a world of difference. Ah, how I could bite my tongue to not risk losing a sale when the money was bound for my own meager wallet! I guess that's part of growing up. Knowing that saying whatever is on your mind is not ALWAYS the best way of getting what you want. Diplomacy: you know, knowing how to behave in a situation, like when NOT to give the German chancellor a shoulder rub! HA!

[In unrelated but exciting news, two people have told me they've spotted Laini's Ladies in the Skymall Magazine on recent flights. How cool is that?]

Hostage

I have your dolly. She is being well treated and as long as you cooperate she will not be harmed. Just show up at the gym each morning at 6 am and in 2 weeks she can come home - if she still wants to. I think she might decide to stay here permanently. Look how good she looks with all those pillows! Also, we let her eat junk cereal, which she says she never gets at home. Signed, Your Kidnapper

It wasn't my idea! Alexandra wanted a little extra incentive to get her butt to the gym for our early morning workouts, so while Jim and I were over at her house she decided to give us something to hold hostage. In order to work it had to be something she loved, but everything I suggested seemed to be something she loved TOO much. It finally came down to a doll version of Sophie's choice. You see, this doll has a sister, one that Alexandra clearly loves better. Squeezing shut her eyes she thrust this doll into my arms and covered her ears so she couldn't hear its tragic cries. I leave it to you to judge her cruelty. In her defense, she has VISITED the doll several times at my house and whispered reassuring words in its ear. AND she has been showing up at the gym, so soon the doll sisters will be reunited. All is well.

The morning workouts have been good. 6 am is freakishly early, but knowing that someone else is straggling out of bed too makes it a little easier. Actually, a lot of someones are. The gym is full at 6 am! What a lot of lean and motivated people there are in the world! Building a new routine feels good too. Over the past several years Jim and I have been adjusting our routine to rise earlier and earlier, arriving at this all-time early of 5:30, just to squeeze more time out of the day. Like toothpaste from a nearly empty tube -- you have to keep rolling it up to get out every little squish. Well, if we keep on like this, rolling up our days like tubes of toothpaste, we'll be getting up at 2 am by the time we're 40! Oy!

It occurred to me the other day to wonder at the strangeness of needing sleep. And so MUCH sleep. What is it in our brains that needs to be shut down like that for so many hours at a time? Any brain experts out there with the answer?

I buy stripper shoes

Let me hasten to say, I am not a stripper. It doesn't fall into my skill set. But I buy shoes from a website that sells stripper shoes. 8" spike-heeled red leather thigh boots, etc. I don't buy those, of course, but the less strippery ones, like those above. I just placed an order for those three pairs (the first pair in black, the second in red, the last as shown). The third pair has a 6-1/4-inch heel, which will be my highest to date, surpassing the 5-1/2-inch cowboy boots Jim got me for Christmas. Do you think me mad? I am addicted to height. If height addiction is like drug addiction then 3-inch platforms were my gateway drug and I am well into the next phase. I can't quit. I really can't. You see, all my pants acquisitions have taken into account the phony extra inches, and if I were to suddenly start wearing flat shoes I would either have to a) learn to hem, or b) buy all new pants. Trousers, that is, for you English. (I once told an English boy he had a hole in his "pants," not realizing that meant undies. There was blushing.)

Alexandra dog-sat for us recently and tried to borrow some of my shoes and HA HA! Having crazy tall shoes is kind of like the shoe equivalent of driving a two-seater so you don't have to offer people rides. NO ONE wants to borrow my shoes! I am alone in my madness, it seems. Except for the strippers. No, I know I'm not alone, but it does irk me when I try to shop in regular non-stripper stores and there is nothing to suit me and my addiction. Yesterday I shopped, and I think I must begin to admit to myself I have a problem, because the three-inch platforms just aren't cutting it for me anymore.

My name is Laini and I'm a heightoholic.

Do you think that hitting rock bottom as a heightoholic will involve stilts?

best things to steal

Weapons are the best things to steal. Steal them from the sweaty fingers of evil people and tie the gun barrels in knots cartoon-style, and collect all the knives and hurl them out of the atmosphere. Try not to hit the moon, because then astronauts will find them and pick knife fights with each other and poke holes in each other’s space suits and deflate. And then our rocket ships would just be parked on the moon with the keys in the ignition, waiting for aliens to find them and go joy-riding.

Steal bombs out of bunkers and replace them with pianos and tubas and model ship-in-bottle kits, so instead of bombing people the terrorists could have hobbies. Don’t forget to include sheet music and wood glue. And snacks, because new hobbies make you hungry.

Steal the black belts right off the waists of kung fu masters. If you can do this, you deserve them more than they do.

Steal animal traps from fields and forests. Set them up in the lobbies of places like Haliburton and GE and the White House. Bait them with money and no-bid contracts. Have a taxidermist standing by to stuff the severed hands as a warning to future generations.

Steal Gothic spires off cathedrals and use them as trellises in your garden. Grow tomato vines and green beans on them and then when you eat your veggies a little bit of holiness will make its way through your digestive tract and into the plumbing, and eventually, to the rivers and oceans, which are in some need of holiness.

Steal coins from wishing wells and see if you can tell, by holding each coin in your fist and concentrating really hard, what wish went with what coin. If you find you have a talent for this, become a fairy godmother.

Steal souls back from the devil. You’ll have to distract him with a Gameboy and then dig up the field in Texas where he keeps the souls buried in small black wedding ring boxes, caked with dust. The souls will be shrunk to the size of lentils or smaller. Take them and go on a pilgrimage -- whenever you find someone without a soul, slip one into his beer or back pocket. The rest will happen naturally.

This has been a Sunday Scribbling. For more tales of thievery, go here.

Ilustration vs Fine Art: a fight to the death

Okay, not to the death, maybe, but there's some tension between illustration and fine art. Recently another blogger asked me about illustration: what is it? How is it distinguished from "fine art"? This is a tricky question: do you know the difference? I'm going to attempt to say what it is, but I'm kind of making it up, so if you have an opinion, let me know what it is!

Illustration. I studied illustration in art school, and my goal was always to illustrate books, whereas I guess a fine artist's goal is to sell original work in gallery shows. For me, the essential difference between illustration and fine art lies not as much in style and medium as in intent: what is the purpose of the particular art work? Illustration is created to be reproduced, be that in a book, on a poster, advertisement, or whatever. I like to think of illustration as "singing for its supper." It has a job to do, whether it's telling a story, or conveying something about a product, and the artist will not be standing next to it to explain it. It must be fully self-sufficient.

Fine art, on the other hand, just is. It can be a bent wire on a wall, or a rumpled bed installation at a snooty gallery, or a geometric painting, or it can be a luminous landscape painting, a portrait, or... and this is where it can get weird, it can also depict a scene and tell a story, just like an illustration. Lots of fine art is illustrative; just as lots of illustration is fine art. But what makes the Sistine Chapel ceiling NOT an illustration, even though it tells a story? It was not done with the intention of being printed and distributed. Ideally fine art should be either beautiful or though-provoking or both, but there's not a heavy burden on it that it convey a clear message.

So why is it important to make a distinction? I don't know if it IS important, but the distinction is made -- when I was in art school at the California College of Art in San Francisco, the painting and illustration departments were wholly distinct from each other, and there was a certain amount of scorn on each side. I know the painters looked down on illustrators as commercial sell-outs, while the illustrators thought [sometimes] that the painters were arty-farty phonies of the type who WOULD hang a bent wire on the wall and have the gall to call it art. Being an illustrator, I am much more familiar with discrimination against fine art, because I am a perpetrator of it. I admit it! I don't "get" abstract art, or bent wires, or babies sculpted from raw meat. I'm not going to say it's not art, but... well, to me, it's not good or interesting art. But that's just me. We illustrators were sometimes known to say, walking through the school's galleries and studio space, "don't step on the art" because you could never be entirely certain if a pile of trash was really a pile of trash, or someone's senior "installation". Ha! There was once a senior photography show that consisted of close-up photos of subjects' face juxtaposed with close-ups of their anuses. That, my friends, is not illustration. It's fine art. I guess. I could go on about weird "art" around campus. Some of it I liked (the laundry line from which enormous clothes were hanging, for example. It made me smile!), some not (the piece of sod with a spike rising from it and a balloon tied to the spike). Whatever!

So meanwhile, what were the illustrators doing? We were learning to paint, but not in the painting department. At CCAC the painting classes weren't very technique-oriented, and illustrators DO need technique, perhaps more than fine artists. Our assignments were more structured. Album covers, art for snowboards or skateboards, magazine covers, book covers, editorial illustration (usually, to accompany a magazine article), things like that. The goal of illustrators is usually to establish a successful freelance career, getting interesting assignments from different art directors, doing book and magazine covers and interiors, ad campaigns, maybe getting into character design for video games or storyboarding for a movie studio. There are clients, and the work is tailored. Usually. My goal was always to write and illustrate my own books and to create what I wanted, and for several years I did that, selling prints of my illustrative paintings at an art fair, before getting into licensing. I've worked with a few art directors, and had very positive experiences with them, and I've only ever done work that was fun for me. Jim went a different route in illustation, doing comic books and role-playing game fantasy art for a few years, though now he is getting more into book illustration and product design & licensing.

I would like to hear more from fine artists -- and to be clear that I do not scorn fine art. There are many gallery painters whose work I love, whose skill I deeply admire (and even covet). It's just FUN to tell the stories of the anuses and meat babies, so I make the most of that silly side of fine art, just for "color." But there are plenty of artists who straddle the line between illustration and fine art and make strong careers on both sides. A few examples are James Jean, Natalie Ascensios, Kinuko Craft, Jon Foster and many more.

I've also recently become familiar with the Duirwaigh Gallery, which focuses on gorgeous fantasy art that crosses that line between illustration and fine art. Its founder has also started a blog which is a lot of fun!

Treadmill daydreams

Exciting exercise news: plans to be at the gym at 6 am every day for 2 weeks. Isn't that a thrill? I've made it 3 days so far, and there's something spectacular about having worked out, walked the dogs, eaten breakfast, and gotten in an hour of writing by 9:30 am! Also, I get great ideas on the treadmill. I'm a daydreamer, yes, and sometimes I let my daydreams drift aimlessly, and other times I focus them like a camera lens. "Focused daydreaming." My best places for this are on the treadmill and in the shower. In the past few workouts the plot of my novel-in-progress has come together like interlacing fingers, all thanks to the monotony of running on a band of rubber. So, I reason that instead of spending the first hour of my day blinking sleepily and drinking coffee, expecting my brain to work at 6 am, I will exercise first and warm up my brain in the process. A new routine! I also recommend focused daydreaming to other creative souls -- it sometimes takes a little training, to keep your mind on the task at hand, but it's just another way to squeeze some more time out of the day!

I met the amazing Anahata for lunch yesterday at the Blossoming Lotus Cafe. It was such a treat to see her in person again! We met three years ago at the National Stationery Show in New York, where she had a booth for her company Papaya, and I was walking around looking for potential licensees (this was when I met Bottman, the company that licenses my Laini's Ladies art). Ever since as I have seen Anahata's gorgeous greeting cards in more and more places, and seen them get more sophisticated and beautiful, I've been cheering her on. And then, recently, I got an email that she had started a blog! And I discovered she lived in Oregon now! So, after three years we actually got to have lunch together and see where our art/business paths have led us each. Different routes, but both good.

Writing room news: The new walls are done and the room is painted! I chose the Behr color "Lipstick" and I LOVE it. In some light it is a rich red-orange; other times it is more coral, sometimes the shade of the flush of red on a mango, sometimes the glowing ruby of a pomegranate seed. A few more steps before the furniture is ready to move in. Can't wait! Ooh, also: I got new glasses finally, my first in 10 years, and let me tell you, glasses frames have CHANGED in 10 years. They're all small and cool and beatnikky now, and they make me feel clever and sly (Isn't "sly" a good word?), like the girl sitting in the corner at the library thinking mysterious things.

Sunday Scribblings #16: "With Baggage"

(That poster has nothing to do with my post; I just like it!) This Sunday Scribble was inspired by something I wrote recently about travelers to the first alien planet opened to travelers. I wondered, what would they bring?

Darklis and Maximoff rarely argued anymore. Their colleagues said they had exhausted all possible topics of controversy when they were newlyweds and could be heard late into the night, night after night, at whatever wigwam, yurt, or igloo was their home for the season. Darklis had a contralto voice and Maximoff was a bass, so their passionate discussions had never been shrill, just a low background noise the other scientists grew accustomed to, like crickets or swamp frogs in the night. They had talked about everything. Djinn, mummies, Krakatoa, the Upanishads and the Shahnameh, the virtues of boomslang venom versus cone snails, the crushing force of an eagle owl’s talons, the death rites of Zoroastrians, and the proper pronunciation of the name of a banshee they had met in an Irish cemetery on their honeymoon.

They were the only couple anyone knew who had honeymooned in a cemetery.

Now, 35 years on, Darklis and Maximoff Kalderash had mapped the alleys of each others minds so well they had only to meet eyes, hers so dark they seemed pupilless, his pale pond green, to seem to have a whole discussion without words. Their children found it unnerving, as if, in some pyramid or chasm somewhere on their travels, their parents had discovered an instruction manual for telepathy and kept it to themselves.It was rather a relief to hear them arguing now.

“Firecrackers? Are you telling me firecrackers express something fundamental about humanity?” said Darklis.

“Absolutely," Maximoff replied. "What’s more human than the desire to blow things up?”

“I wish you were joking.”

“I wish I was, too, but look at the world. And as we can’t very well bring bombs to Andrash, we may as well bring fireworks.”

“NASA will never allow it, anyway, Max. Nothing combustible, remember? You can find some other way to teach the natives about war. Or,” Darklis smiled mischievously at her husband, “we can just edit that out.”

He laughed. “You want to teach human history to an alien race and edit out the bits about war? Have fun, darling. I’d like to see the history books after you’ve been through them with a censor’s marker.”

“There wouldn’t be much left, would there?”

Maximoff laughed. “A little art, some agriculture... couldn’t get near religion...”

They started to laugh and got the giggles, thinking of the slender volume of history they could present if they were to avoid any mention of the wars that had shaped their civilization. They kept trying to say, "It isn't funny," and then dissolving back into helpless laughter. “There’s nothing for it,” Darklis said finally. “They’ll soon see what a warmongering race they’ve welcomed to their planet.”

“So what can we bring to offset that image? That’s what we need to think about.”

“Indeed.”

The fleet was leaving for Andrash in one month, and the Kalderash family with it. Scouts had been negotiating this diplomatic mission through the stars for more than ten years, and the time was here at last. For most of those ten years Darklis and Maximoff had been keeping lists of what they would bring should they be approved for the mission, and now they were finalizing those lists and packing their steamer trunks.

The coffee was already packed, of course, and the chocolate. Trays of spices, sealed and labeled by continent. Bundled silks and brocades and bolts of synthetics like fleece made of recycled plastic. Gems. Gold. Antiobiotics. Carved jade. Eyeglasses. A telescope from the middle ages, and several new telescopes, state of the art. A bicycle and a sack of soccer balls. Books. The Arabian Nights, Harry Potter, and the planet’s religious texts in no particular order. Photo albums from 25 families and the complete set of National Geographic magazines. Hair clips, donated human braids in every conceivable color, butterfly wings, cases of colored feathers, the complete skeletons of eighty species of creatures. Bags of potato chips, snack size, and a case of Jell-o instant pudding mix -- just add water! There was water on Andrash, but as of yet, there was no pudding.

Comic books and candles, a violin, a guitar, and a saxaphone. A ventriloquist’s dummy and a soldier sculpture from a Chinese tomb. A lifesize replica of Michelangelo’s David, and a statue of Kali -- Darklis had argued the goddess’s many arms would confuse the Andrashians, but Maximoff won that argument.

And then there were the living things. Not pairs -- this was no Noah’s Arc. Single caged creatures: a horse, a Siberian Husky, a tabby cat and a snow-white chicken, a spider monkey, a gazelle, an iguana, a camel, a flamingo, a fruit bat, a kangaroo, and a tank of angel fish. They would be put to sleep for the voyage as the human passengers were, and would awaken in a strange landscape. Everyone on Earth had seen the photos: the hills red as blood, the alien vegetation, the tall cone houses and the strange beings that lived in them.

“What else?” Maximoff asked. “What are we missing?”

What would you take in your baggage to another planet, in an attempt to explain our world to aliens?

(P.S. All names in this story came from my recent research into Romany names. How cool are they? Darklis? Andrash? So cool.)

thanky thanky thanky

Yay to my new banner (& thanks for your compliments) & thanks especially to the technical genius of Bohemian Girl, without whom this design would still be a sad little orphan on my desktop. Thanks, Denise!

And thanks also to Greenish Lady for sending me her exquisite poetry book, Shout If You Want Me To Sing. It's beautiful in content and presentation -- gorgeous cover, but especially, gorgeous poems! Thanks, Imelda!

And thanks also to Bonnie for her facts about peepal trees when she read my story "Spicy Little Curses Such As These" (I hope I didn't scare you with my babbling excited email about picking your brain with all sorts of geography and landscape and flora & fauna questions about Central Asia and the Himalayas. I wish I could go on a fact-finding mission of my own, but alas, it's a world away.)

I am deep in research for my second novel, and have been trying to nail down the exotic locations around Asia, to give it a real feeling of place, which is an ambitious thing to attempt with a place one has never been, but I'm going to try it anyway. I got very sidetracked in my reading about the Old Silk Road yesterday evening and ended up drooling over adventure vacations that follow said road to Samarkand and beyond... And though Central Asia isn't at the top of my travel to-do list, this site made me want to do something rash like book a trip to a place I had never even heard of before, like Lake Son-Kul on the "Kyrgyz Riviera". Who knew Kyrgystan had a riviera? And at 4000 meters elevation. It is, apparently, a paradise for shepherds. I resisted the impulse to book the trip.

Other current subjects of research: silk production, especially cottage industry; the teak trade; dragonflies; caravansarays; Romany names; the Hindu Kush, and more. It's amazing the way the world starts to unfold when you just pick a topic you don't know about and start poking around. How many worlds there are, essentially tucked into this one world. And how many pockets in time. It all just lights my mind on fire. I wish I could've taken more history classes in college. I wish I had time to now. In any case, thank god for books and the internet!

And lastly, thanks for all the well-wishing about Jim's health. Fingers crossed, for all of us, that the big C stays well out of our lives and the lives of everyone we know & love.

Good news & bad news

That's a picture of dinner last night. Yummm... I had just finished making vegetable soup and I looked at it and completely didn't feel like eating it. It wasn't even that hot, it just wasn't a "soupy" kind of night. It was a "fruity" night. Maybe because we'd had a heavy-ish lunch downtown earlier in the day -- it was a celebratory lunch. Yesterday was Jim's two-year-cancer-free-iversary. Yay! It was the biannual trip to the oncologist to get test results, which continue well, but to be honest, no trip to the oncologist is really a nice thing. No matter how good of news one gets, there are all those other people waiting in the waiting room, young and old, and it's a glimpse into a world we seldom see, if we're lucky. It's still surreal to me, walking through a door that says "oncology" on it. The first time, I almost had a panic attack. It would have been my first. I'm not a panicker, but I started to breathe weird and felt this hysteria welling up in me. Now... it's still freaky, and then after the good news, still sad for the other people.

I will also always remember when Jim came home after his surgery and we had rented some videos and set him up on the couch to relax and watch The Office -- the British version. Words of wisdom: do not rent comedy for people fresh out of abdominal surgery! Laughter is not always the best medicine! He had to keep trying to laugh without moving his abdominal muscles, and it was the funniest sounding thing! (We are still big Office fans, US version, too. Dwight Shrute is one of my favorite characters on TV. Love him!)

On a sad note, though, it looks like the coyotes have gotten another of my mother's cats, this time the baby, Zucca (Pumpkin) who just celebrated his first birthday, party and all. Because my parents live on the edge of the wilds of Forest Park, the cats are only allowed out very sparingly, in daylight, and closely watched. But Zucca is a mad little hunter and he busted through a screen and got out... and he hasn't come back. There is already an engraved stone at the edge of the garden for "Our Old Warrior," my mom's eighteen-year-old tomcat Pesca who got grabbed by something in broad daylight when they first moved to Oregon. My mom is beginning to hate her beautiful house and its invisibly circling gang of horrible coyotes, which she has never gotten so much of a glimpse of. I still have a teeny tiny hope that little Zucca might come back, but you know how it goes.

Furniture Frenzy!!

I have a new favorite furniture store -- which is not to say I have an old favorite furniture store -- we don't buy furniture. We're artists... we don't walk into stores and point at $1400 sofas and say "I'll take it." Noooo, among my people, sari fabric draped over parents' hand-me-down sofas is a "new sofa." Well, until now...

The new favorite furniture store is Cargo, in the Pearl District. It's a warehouse filled with antique chests and benches and puppet theaters from Java and Bali and China, with parasols and lanterns and dusty rugs, cabinet beds and trays and beads and old rusty gates and pieces of houses that we must imagine, have finally fallen over on some backstreet of Surabaya or Jombang. I went to Cargo by mistake a few weeks back when I was hunting for a glass shop to buy glass for my mosaic table, and I walked in and almost had a heart attack. I wanted to call Jim, but as usual my cell phone battery was dead (I just can't be bothered plugging that thing in) so I had to wander around gasping like a fish, like a furniture-loving fish. I have never really been into Asian style. Not for me, the fu dogs and shiny busy Chinese ceramics. But our trip to Turkey (mentioned in my last post) instilled in us a love for the gypsy caravan look of Turkish rugs and peeling chests of the Near East, and Turkey is as near as the east gets, of course. But now, my love has extended to Indonesian antiques.

Pictured above is our adored new "bench" from Bali (bench is such an inadequate term!) -- you see, Jim gasped like a furniture-fish too when I dragged him into Cargo a few days ago and agreed we needed to adopt it immediately into our loving family, and after wrangling this piece of solid teak massiveness into the back of the truck and barely BARELY squeezing it through the front door, it is presiding over the living room in quite a queenly fashion. As Alexandra has been known to do with her beloved leather armchair, we are still in the phase of sitting in the old sofa so we can LOOK at it, rathing than actually sitting ON it. And you can't really grasp the size of the thing in the photos, but when I sit on it, my toes do not reach the floor!!

I also went a little crazy and bought a cool old Indonesian porch pillar for the corner of my writing room (the work is progressing in there!) to hang lanterns off of or something, but now I need to revert to the old ways of not buying things, and try to forget this little mania that overcame me. Not buying things is a pretty easy habit to maintain, when you're a starving artist, but buying things can become a habit pretty easily too, when you become less starving. I think we're furnitured up for the next little while!

Sunday Scribblings #15: Hotel Stories

1. The year I was nine we lived in the Hotel Flamingo for more than a month: two parents, three kids, and one very large Alaskan Malamute who would become known in this Italian town as “cane lupo.” Dog wolf. We weren’t the only Americans in residence at the Flamingo, there were a number of other Navy families in our same situation: just arrived from the States, househunting. The school bus picked us up there, and the hotel kitchen made us bag lunches. We did our homework in the Mediterranean heat, poolside. There were skirmishes with Italian kids in the side alleys. We had assigned tables in the dining room, and regular waitors. Ours, Bruno, was a darling with curly hair and was surely one of my earliest crushes. We moved into an apartment nearby and didn’t return to the Flamingo, but many Americans did, spending summer days beside a very ordinary hotel pool when a gem of a beach was just a short walk away! The Flamingo was one of the centers of Americans-pretending-to-be-in-America; it was safe. But my family was different: my mom spoke fluent Italian and had lived in Rome for a year in the ‘60s, when she was a beautiful girl with green eyeshadow. In Gaeta she recruited Italian boys to coach our soccer teams, and became the only Navy wife whose best friend was Italian. But those weeks in the hotel were a treat for a nine year old, like a long vacation!

2. When I was eleven we all piled into our beat-up green Volkswagon bus and drove up through Italy to Nice, France, for Mardi Gras. We checked into our modest little pensione and went out to explore the city; while out and about, my father ran into a woman he knew, the woman who happened to be in charge of the city’s carnival parades. My father was at that time responsible for making the schedules of ports of call for every US Navy vessel in the Mediterranean, and I have a vague impression he knew her somehow through his work duties. In any case, she was busy and gave him the brush off. Fine. But when we returned to our little pensione later that day we were told men had come to take our luggage away! We pictured thugs, thieves! But in fact this woman, regretting her rudeness, had found out where we were staying and moved us to the official hotel of the Carnival: the Negresco.

The Negresco is a 5-star hotel. It remains the only 5-star hotel I have ever set foot in. When we pulled up to the valet in our ratty VW with gouge marks on both sides from getting wedged in an alley in Naples, we felt... out of our element. We pretended to belong there. I can just picture my brother and I in our ski parkas (it was the Riviera, yes, but February, and raining), noses snootily in the air as if we did this every day! Our room, compliments of, I suppose, the City of Nice, was an eleven-room suite overlooking the beach and the parade route. It was HEAVEN!! And the room-service breakfast cart, piled with delectable things... Like a dream. Paloma Picasso was a guest while we were there, and at one point a Saudi man in full sheik attire took a liking to my white-blonde five-year-old sister and told my mother he would buy Emily anything she wanted in the hotel gift gallery. To my mother’s mortification, he was pointing out diamonds, but my sister saved the day as only a five-year-old can, by desiring only chocolate, an acceptable gift from a strange rich sheik!

3. I have slept in a fairy chimney, and in a treehouse by the sea! Both, in Turkey. Jim and I went to Turkey six years ago, in between visiting Alexandra in Bulgaria and going on to Italy, where Jim proposed to me! And we LOVED Turkey. Go there, everyone! And if you go, go to Cappadoccia. It is the most otherworldly landscape I have ever explored, a sandcastle of a land, barren and bizarre and so outrageously beautiful. “Fairy chimneys” are the name for the dwellings hollowed out of the strange rock formations, and in Goreme, all the hotels are carved into the rock. They’re not fussy, but have rough-hewn windows and lots of Turkish carpets, and patios overlooking the most amazing cityscapes.

The treehouse was set in a lemon grove at Olympos, by the sea. A rickety bus carried us down into a forested ravine and back along a single road lined with clusters of treehouses. A short ramble through thick forest, past Byzantine ruins, leads to a secluded beach. And at night there are hikes up the mountain to see a naturally occuring eternal flame, flickering right out of the rock now for hundreds of years. If you go, bring marshmallows. We didn’t, but thought it would have been fun!

I love travel, and I love hotels and youth hostels in old strange buildings. In Spain I stayed in a former prison, in Vietnam in a room in the belly of a giant giraffe sculpture! I have never yet slept in a hammock slung in a beach shack in Mexico, but I would like to, someday! And as fun as that stay at the Negresco was when I was eleven, I would take the fairy chimney or the treehouse, or the modest little pensione by the cathedral in Amalfi, any day, and spend the difference buying puppets and blown-glass perfume bottles and sandals!

for more "hotel stories" go here.

the fruit of my lacerations

I'm typing this with wounded fingers. I have finished my mosaic table and, as with my one previous mosaic experience, my fingers aren't pretty. I thought things were going pretty well, I got through the glass-cutting with but a few tiny glass splinters in my fingertips. I had sort of forgotten that it is the grouting process that is murder on fingers. Ouch. Because I used glass, very pointy, sharp glass, instead of mosaic craft tiles, it is very hard to smooth the grout on, and to wipe the surface clean as it dries, without lacerating one's fingers. But anyway, it's done! Here are some more pictures:


I used scrapbook letters to spell out the words, and sealed them down with matte medium, and then mosaiced with clear glass where I wanted them to show. Ditto with the polka dots on the top. So it's a combo collage/mosaic. Now, I will let my fingers heal for a few days before I go back to fix the grout, which in my haste, I wiped away too much of.

I hope my fellow Americans out there had a lovely 4th of July. We did. We don't ever go out on the 4th, which other dog owners will understand: my poor old Shiloh probably drooled half her body weight with her freakish panicked panting last night. Dogs do not love fireworks, and as Jim said last night, the first thing they will do when they take over the world, is abolish holidays that involve explosions. We had some friends over for BBQ and build-your-own banana splits:

(That's Camille showing me how she can put her toe in her mouth. I think I can probably do it, too, but I won't try.) And there is Maggie and Chary with the banana split fixins, and Jim with his masterpiece, shortly before devouring it.

We also took my niece Izzy hiking to Punchbowl Falls in the Columbia Gorge on Sunday:

I LOVE it there. The perfect place on a hot day. The falls go through a small ravine that widens out to a bank of sun-warmed rocks, and then to another waterfall, and there are places to wade in the deliciously cool shade, and then just a few steps away you can stretch out like a lizard in the sun if you want. You can jump off cliffs if you're insane, or swim out to the falls, but it's icy, so wading usually cures my desire to swim. Izzy did go swimming in her clothes though.

And lastly, after writing my last post, I DID call Lori in Amsterdam and we had a lovely chat, and Jim and I are scheming to maybe visit Holland in the fall, and try to time it to my old babysitter/soccer coach's wedding in Genoa, Italy, and do both. Hm. Might just be a fantasy. But often, things that start as fantasies become reality. Fingers crossed!

Sunday Scribblings #14 - "Two peas in a pod"

There is only really one person who comes to mind for me when I think "two peas in a pod:" Lori! My other half in high school, Lori Lee Fitzgerald. We met at a Model United Nations meeting at Fountain Valley High School, California, in the heart of Orange County in the worst of all hair decades: the dread '80s. 1987, to be precise. Lori was a native to this soil; I was a newcomer, fresh from 6 years in Europe, and I was discovering that most of my new classmates had no idea where "Belgium" was. Texas? Eastern Europe? Close... (Have you heard the horrifying tales of Americans' geography skills? They're true.) I had come from a school of 200 kids, to a monstrosity of 3000+, a zoo of weird bad hair choices a few miles from the beach. I had made some friends playing soccer over the summer, so I had some girls to eat lunch with, but it wasn't until I met Lori that I had a REAL friend, and instantly. An instant click. After that, we were inseparable. I can't hear Erasure songs without flashing back to her, and to the boy we both had a year-long unrequited crush on. For me, this agonizing crush ended abruptly when this boy corrected my grammar. It was like a switch had been flipped. I saw him later, we both went to college at Berkeley, and he looked... meager... as is the way with so many cute boys from high school when you get a peek at them in college. My other big crush went to Lori's college so I saw him too. He was the adored-by-all quarterback of the football team, with black hair and light light blue eyes, and he didn't look meager, just balding, which inspired a certain amount of schadenfreude.

But it wasn't all boys. I sort of cringe thinking of what the social world of that time and place was like, the stupid parties I never enjoyed, the big expensive proms and the football games. But I have very fond memories of driving the Coast Highway with Lori in my convertible beetle with the top down, singing at the top of our lungs. A lot of the other stuff is sort of vague now. I was NOT one of those people who lamented the end of high school. The DAY AFTER graduation I was on a plane back to Europe, and didn't come home, and missed my first semester of college.

Ironically, it is LORI who is now an EU citizen. She married a Dutchman and has lived in Amsterdam for some 12 years now. The picture above is when I visited her there ten years ago. Ten years! God, how time goes by! So we're two peas long ago shelled out of our pod, but I love her dearly. I think I'll call her...

Robot Friends

As Jim has also just posted about, yesterday we went down to OMSI (the children's science museum) to see the Robot exhibit. As you see above, we had some meaningful conversation with new friends. I love OMSI, and every time my niece Izzy visits I take her there -- over spring break we went to the Animation exhibit and made our own stop-motion dance movie; previously it was the "Animal Grossology" exhibit -- all the grossest things about critters. Great stuff! Usually we also see an Omnimax movie on the huge dome screen (a crazy-gorgeous experience!), and buy stuff from the great gift shop. like freeze-dried icecream sandwiches! I think we should all remember, even if we don't have kids of our own, to either borrow them as an excuse to do kid-stuff, or just unashamedly do kid-stuff anyway!

A Delightful Return to Napping

More of the delights of summer. And these, unlike the anonymous watermelon photo from my last post, were actually, delightfully, consumed by us. Those snap peas were the paragon of snap peas. Yum! In other summer news, the heatwave has broken, thank GOD. I'll have my nap back today! How I've missed it.

No big news today, or inspiring words, or kooky stories about curses (though I'm about to go work on it and hopefully finish it). Today I just want to encourage you to visit this site and watch the video; also, read the little bio. This guy's name is Matt and he has done his dorky, endearing dance in some of the great places of the world. It brought such a smile to my face! And it makes me drool to travel. Sigh. Is anyone planning any wonderful exotic trips anytime soon?

Ooh -- also: our contractor "broke ground" on the soon-to-be writing room yesterday! Broke ceiling, I suppose you would say. It's going to be such a great room. I can't wait to get in there with paint, and to go shopping for curtains and such! I've also been mosaicing a thrift store table to go beside my awesome green bench. I love to mosaic. I told Jim I'm going to give up everything else, illustration, writing, everything, and devote myself to mosaics. (just kidding)

Oh my poor neglected nap!

This is not the actual watermelon I just ate. There is no photographic evidence THAT watermelon ever existed, which is kind of sad, because it was a MIGHTY FINE watermelon. Oh me oh my.

Things I love about summer:
- watermelon
- blueberries
- corn on the cob
- sidewalk cafes
- toes in the river
- fewer TV distractions
- long, long days

Things I do NOT love about summer:
- HEAT!!!

Egad, we're having a heatwave in Portland - today is the hottest June 26th on record. I hate heat. On top of all its others miseries, like drying out the plants and all, it is just TERRIBLE for naps. We have air-conditioning in only one room, the studio, and so on a day like today, over 100 degrees, it is in the studio we must be, and there are not any napping surfaces in the studio. So I had to skip my beloved nap today and power through the drowsy hour between 2 and 3. I am a napper. I find it is the best way for me to get up early, and go to bed late, both of which I like to do. But this heat messes up everything.

But, with the exception of naptime, I would be in the studio anyway, so it's not such a big deal. I worked some more on my Sunday Scribble cliffhanger today. It is growing, and it has a new title: "Spicy Little Curses Such As These." Though one commenter assumed I knew where the story was going, I didn't totally. I couldn't figure out why the old lady laid the curse on the child to begin with. The starting point was Sleeping Beauty and the christening curse, so I suppose she was a Malificent figure, but I'm not so interested in villains without motives. I like to explore really difficult choices. Then, last night as I was falling asleep, the Orpheus myth came into my head and it seemed so perfect, since this story was my response to the "music" prompt. That brought on many more ideas and prompted a morning of googling Hindu belief in Hell, which led to the Katha Upanishad and Hindu near-death stories. (this is very interesting: Hindu near-death accounts differ significantly from Christian ones. While in Christian ones there is the going towards the light and being greeted by family members who tell you to go back, it's not your time, in Hindu versions the patients relate being taken forcibly by these kind of underworld thug-bureaucrats to an authority figure, often with a clipboard, who discovers a mistake has been made and sends the person back.) I love Google.

So, as far as the rest of the story goes, I am not going to post it here, but if you would like to read it, email me and I will email it to you when it's finished. I am having so much fun with it, and I'm sort of inspired by the idea of stories that that combine elements from several fairy tales or myths, as in this case, Sleeping Beauty + Orpheus, throw in some India, and what do you have? I don't have time right now to really explore short stories, though. But from time to time I may indulge.

Sunday Scribblings #13 - Music

Oh dear, oh dear. This is my longest post. You don't have to read it. BUT if you're interested in fairy tale curses and India and opera and love, maybe you'll read it. I had so much fun writing last week's sexy fairy tale scribble I decided to keep on with it and write a fairy tale involving music, and a curse, and kissing. The kind of kissing where teeth clash and lives are ruined. Have you heard of that kind of kissing? I think I just made it up. Anyway, the story took off, and here it is, and I realize I am only sheepish about its length because I'm a shameless comment-hog and I'm afraid you won't read it. But I'm okay with that, because the main thing I wanted out of Sunday Scribblings was to get myself writing stories, and I AM. And I LOVE IT. Cheers. (More scribbles here.)

ARIA

**story removed because it is being published. Yay!**

copyright Laini Taylor 2006

What We Love

Do you know what you love, and what you want to create? Do you know how to listen to yourself, your impulses, your voice? It seems it should be as natural as breath: as you breathe out your own breath and no one else's, so too you dream out your own dreams and no one else's, right? Maybe not. There are a whole lot of filters our dreams have to get through on their way out into the world. Along the way, they can get... compromised. Tweaked, twisted like reflections in a funhouse mirror, and even kidnapped and replaced by other dreams. And I'm not just talking about dreams. Mainly, I think, I'm talking about creative voice. The shape and life your creativity takes in the world. Are you writing what you want to write? Are you drawing what you want to draw? On the surface it seems this is something that SHOULD come as naturally as breathing, but does it?

Lately I've been reading echoes in a lot of different blogs of a kind of creative self-discovery, writers and artists questioning whether their creativity is taking its natural shape. Several writers I regularly read have written about accepting that what they LOVE writing isn't fiction - which perhaps they think they SHOULD love - but personal writing. There may be some resistance, thinking this kind of writing isn't as accepted in the world, it's harder to explain to non-kindred spirits. I think of SARK's books, and how before they existed many in the publishing industry surely would not have considered them publishable. Who would buy those silly little books, I imagine them asking. Well, HA! SHE knew. She believed what was deeply important to her would be deeply important to lots of other women, and it IS. (And it sells!)

An artist whose blog I read is struggling a little in art school, with too many voices, it seems to me, telling her what kind of artist to be. So I've been thinking a lot about this: how do we discover what we love, and who we are?

There are a few things that kind of work for me, though I see they seem to be in conflict:

1.) I discover what I love by being alone with myself and being playful and experimental. By shutting out the other voices, by trying this and trying that and seeing what settles into my soul with a deep sigh of satisfaction. A dressing room approach to writer's voice & artist's style. What fits me? What fits MY thighs? What fits MY mind? Of course, different things work for different people, but for me, being around a whole crew of other creative people is only good in short little spurts, like retreats or conferences. Then I need to be alone with me. Art school had its benefits, but I know now I was right to drop out after three semesters. I do not thrive in a competitive atmosphere of coveting others' talents. If only I could draw like that... If only I'd thought up that plot... No. It makes me curl up like a little snail in the dark and feel sorry for myself. I want to be the only artist in my head! Also, the art I love making now, like my new Laini's Ladies Bohemian collection (of which the above image is one) would not have garnered me praise in art school. Art school was about edginess and coolness, about being non-commercial. Dark. Not me, not so much. That environment is supposed to encourage the emergence of personal creative voice, but in my opinion art school best encourages those whose styles fit in the current mode, and others find themselves trying to adapt themselves to what's considered cutting edge. I'm not cutting edge, and cutting edge people make me a little nervous.

2.) I pay close attention to what I love when I find it in the world. When I read a book I can't put down and can't get out of my head, I try to figure out WHY I can't put it down, WHY I can't get it out of my head. What did the writer DO to me? And how can I do that to others? (See? that conflicts with the non-coveting, being alone in my head thing, but whatever. Maybe because this is technical: how did they DO it, not: dang, I wish I'd done it.) I was about halfway through writing Blackbringer when a big fat book totally took over my life for a few days and after I finished it, I made a list of the chief elements I thought made me love it so much. Not plot points, but things like this:

- camaraderie: a group of wonderful characters gathered around the protagonist, all cool and powerful and all fiercely loyal to each other.

- romance: the drawing together of two characters who don't yet know each other, but who the reader can see are so meant for each other; the suspense of waiting for them to meet, for their relationship to unfold.

Those were already elements of Blackbringer, but making that list made me more aware of crafting them and making the most of them.

I don't think this post is shaping itself towards any profound conclusion, but I would like to know what other people think: how easy is it for you to recognize what you love doing and do it? Is it natural for you, or do you have to gouge your way to it, through barriers and external voices?

Sunday Scribblings #12 - Bed

Fairy tale princesses. Those virtuous girls with flesh tender as lily petals, all unsmudged by manly fingers, were they indeed as pure as that? How grave and dull if they were, and their beds, how clean, how sweatless. Did they never fall back into rumpled sheets, their hair a nest of tangles round flushed faces? Did they never bite their lips in the night to keep from crying out and alerting the witch, or the queen, to their pleasure? Did they never shiver as their gowns were slowly, tantazlizingly unlaced, or better yet just lifted like a rising sea of lace about their waists? Did they never feel the secret heat of breath upon their necks and thighs?

And did Rapunzel lay back upon her narrow tower bed alone each night with only her hair for company and dream of freedom, of wading through waist-high wheat, of flying? Or did she wake in fever a half dozen times with the phantom touch of a dream lover’s hand fading from her flesh? Did she clasp herself in her own arms, imagining them to be another’s arms, imagining she was loved? And when the prince finally came through her window like a dream made real, what then?

And Swan Lake? Those dozens of princesses, swans by day, maidens by night, dancing to keep warm when the twilight twinkled their feathers away into nothing but smooth skin, naked until morning. They must have become feral creatures living so long as birds: flying, walking barefoot in snow, feeding wild. Those long human limbs might have felt like the enchantment; they might have forgotten which was true, maid or bird. Did they sleep as humans, curled naked in a nest, or as swans with their heads tucked beneath their wings? And when the prince came forth on horseback and spied them there, dancing in their human skins, naked and wild the under moon, what then?

And what of the pea? Of all the absurd ideas, flesh so tender as to detect a pea beneath dozens of mattresses! How was such a dainty creature to ever endure childbed, or a husband’s touch? What a fool that old queen was to dream up such a test. I have a theory. When that lovely amnesiac maiden wandered in from the wilds and the queen squinted down her long, imperious nose at her, the old snob was ripe to be fooled. I think the moment she turned her back her son winked at the mysterious young lady and she, with a complicit gleam in her eye, winked back. Surely she did not climb the ladder alone to her high bed that night: the prince was right behind her, caressing her ankles as she climbed. And I think she was telling the truth in the morning when she claimed not to have slept a wink. Such a bed as that wasn’t made for sleeping! I imagine they hid under the covers, whispering, giggling at their own deception, their eyes feverish with longing -- until now, they’d only met in the woods near her family’s modest cottage. It was the prince who’d begun to plot after his mother devised her foolish test for some other prospective bride of dubious nobility. But they’d had to wait months to carry it out so the maid could soak her work-rough hands and pummice away her telltale calluses. Now the time had finally come. The high bed, the absurd pea. And because I am a romantic I imagine this was the first time the prince slipped his hand -- trembling a little -- up his love’s slim calf, over her knee... the first time he took her earlobe between his lips, and the first time she hooked her small foot around his leg and pulled him close. They fell silent then and grew serious, their eyes bright under the covers, so much in love this towering bed was their entire world. So much depended upon it -- they might have waited, just to be safe. But they’d waited so long already, whilst she soaked away her calluses so she could pose as a princess, and pretend to be bruised by a pea.

Read more scribblings here.

Happy Swigging

I just wrote a catch-up email to Meg in which I got started listing the things I've been working on lately and couldn't seem to stop listing. I realized... there's been a LOT of work happening here lately. It made me feel good, especially since yesterday I got to check several things off my ever-present list: three new collections of images for my licensing agent, as well as mailing some prints of my Cricket cover off to an amazing school in India (more on that in a minute). In the midst of that I've been working on my revisions to Blackbringer and I THINK it's going well. I actually LIKE revising, for this reason: it's easier than writing!!

Then, some celebrating had to be squeezed in there somewhere, celebrating Jim getting to illustrate my book jacket, and just the book in general. The contract process was so long and halting and filled with waiting and anti-climax and more waiting there was never that one moment to throw a hat in the air and shriek, but now it's feeling more real all the time, talking "trim size" and other real, tangible things makes me realize: my book is going to have physical form and be in bookstores! So, that called for some happy swigging. Though tempted to go to our favorite restaurant Bombay Cricket Club, we branched out and tried a Cajun place called Acadia. We started with cocktails, then moved into wine with dinner, and then to some chocolate + liquor concoction for dessert, along with pecan pie and "gooey butter cake." Oh my. And I forgot to mention we opened a bottle of amazing zinfandel from our trip to San Luis Obispo before going out, so basically, we met our booze quota for the next several months, but we were still up before seven this morning, so all is well. (Though I did have a strange dream in which I had a peg leg, and not some fancy prosthesis either, but a plain pirate-style peg, and interestingly, it was extra long so I could wear it with my 5-inch-heeled cowboy boots!)

About the school in India: a few months ago I got one of my favorite emails of all-time, from a fellow whose company sends books and magazines to the Shanti Bhavan School in Bangalore, India. It's a school that takes destitute slum children right off the streets and gives them a world-class education. How about that? Why isn't there MUCH MORE of that in the world? Imagine if all rich people spent money setting up schools for poor children. That million dollars Lindsay Lohan spent on clothes last year? Anyway, the part that made it my favorite email of all-time was that the kids loved my Cricket magazine cover, because it's a scene set in India, and they said they thought I must have been Indian in a previous life! They renamed the painting "The Tigre Raj" which is so much better than my uninspired "Parade." It is so exciting knowing that kids around the world are seeing my art! There's just no feeling like it.

I've been feeling like I don't have much to write about in my blog lately. I've been just work-work-working, and when I read other people's blogs I'm often jealous of what a rich inner life they seem to have. For better or worse, I don't spend much time in self-contemplation. I just get up with Jim, eat breakfast, walk the dogs while daydreaming about work, then get home, brew coffee, and... work. Til about midnight. Hm. But we HAVE been showing signs of trying to live a little, and I don't mean just the swigging. The little one-night trips, little hikes, cafe-writing expeditions, those are a move in the right direction for us. But usually, we just want to be working!

Yo Gabba Gabba, etcetera

I swiped this photo right off of The Excitement Machine, a blog I came across on one of those aimless link-to-link wanderings that can turn up so much strangeness and wonder. What IS Yo Gabba Gabba? I'm not quite sure if it's real or a spoof, but it appears to be a children's program involving live toy monsters, and if you click here you can see the trailer.

Here's what else I discovered on that little "walk" through blogland:

- Anna Ventura's lovely paperdolls

- A class Anahata is teaching this fall on "funky wallpaper murals". Oooooh...

- This local artist's website & blog. I've never been to her shop but it's only a few miles from my house, so I'm going!

Every time I do that, meander the links, I get pretty overwhelmed by how large this world is, this blog-world, how we're "living" in a teeny tiny neighborhood of it and inside everyone's "house" so to speak, there are a hundred more doors, into new neighborhoods, new worlds. It makes my brain do strange little jumping jacks trying to picture all the dazzling lines of connection that run between all our computers. (Metaphorically, of course, but don't put it past me to imagine a string and paper cups connecting us all!)

Also, I have GREAT news. We found out yesterday that Jim gets to illustrate my book! He's been rallying for the assignment and has done a number of pieces for the editor and publisher and art department to look at, and though they let him know a few weeks ago that he was hired to do interior spot illustrations, he only got the news yesterday about the book jacket. I wish I could post the art that finally decided them, and which will in all likelihood be the cover to Blackbringer, but I think there are people who would frown if I did that. It's a secret... but I can't wait to show you. It's my favorite thing my talented husband has ever drawn! Cheers, all!

Sunday Scribblings #11 & Anniversary Getaway

Mystery -- this was my choice of topic this week, and it's something I could go on and on about: a reader's frustration with real life, with the notion that while in fiction "all will be revealed in time," in life it's not so. There are many things we will never ever know. So, the prompt is, of all mysteries large and small, what mystery would you have unveiled for you if you could?

I've thought about it and I think honestly, if I could know any great cosmic mystery at all, it wouldn't be: is God real? It would be: Are there sentient beings on other planets, and what are they like? And have they indeed visited us on Earth, are they technologically superior to us, how many different species in how many different worlds? I had a dream a long time ago that I woke up from and started immediately to plot as a story (which I never wrote). In it, two travel-writers and their adolescent children are part of the first civilian flight to the first planet discovered with sentient life. The characters in my dream were no doubt based on my old bosses, Tony & Maureen Wheeler, the founders of Lonely Planet Travel Guides. These two started the company in the 60s by driving an old van across Central Asia, about which no travel guide yet existed. They then holed up in Australia for a time and wrote up their notes, typed and stapled them and started selling them to local bookstores. Decades later they own a company that has opened the most mysterious places in the world up to adventurers, and their children have been along for the ride. This is a complete tangent, but it seems appropriate enough. I still sort of love that idea, of being the first travel writer to an alien civilization that will soon be finding itself inundated with rich earthling adventure tourists. In the dream it turned dark and came to light that not all the sentient species on the planet were friendly.

I'm not an abduction conspiracy theorist. I'd just love to know. What's going on out there in all that vasty blackness? I'd also like to know -- in the earthly realm -- how sophisticated is whale speech really? Do they have syntax and vocabulary? Do they tell each other stories? How does their intelligence stack up to ours? I really really wish there was a way to know that!

ON ANOTHER NOTE, Jim and I just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary!



Yay, us! It's been a wonderful though lightning-quick 5 years since that day in the forested hills above Berkeley, California, when we stood facing each other on a lawn, all teary and overwhelmed with love. We got married at the Brazil Pavillion that was salvaged from the San Francisco World's Fair, a lovely lovely spot, and everything about the day was perfect. We didn't take a honeymoon really but just drove back up the coast to Oregon, stopping along the way at the Russian River, Mendocino, and the Redwoods. To celebrate our anniversary we went out to the Oregon coast thursday, to Manzanita, a wonderful small beach town less than two hours from Portland. It's rustic and free of beachy motels and wax museums and boardwalks. There's a wine bar and a few shops and NO souvenirs anywhere! We stayed in a skinny two-story tower-cabin, walked on the beach, ate taffy, and drove to the nearby river towns of Wheeler and Nehalem for some antique shopping. On the way home we made the short hike through the woods to Oswald West beach, one of the loveliest beaches I have ever seen.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless wood/ There is a rapture on the lonely shore/ There is society where none intrude/ By the deep sea and music in its roar/ I love not man the less, but nature more." - Lord Byron.

Now, after two beautiful trips to the coast in the past month, I'm daydreaming about having a cabin there. Dream, dream!

young & dumb & 'fat' & boycrazy

"I came to the conclusion that I wasn't smart until I was thirty." That's from Madness's current post, and is an observation made as a result of reading her own old journals. Ah, me too! Me too! A few weeks ago I put up some silliness from my college writing journals and some readers responded that they can't bear to read their old journals -- well, me either -- those were "writing" journals filled with exercises, daily writing, poetry. NOT my whiney personal journals that seemed to be concerned with a) how fat I was (I was not), and b) boys. How vapid and silly was I? Very. But I thought I was quite the serious young woman. That's the funny part of it. I thought I was smart. I got good grades. I had a good vocabulary. I was worldly. I grew up in Europe, ooh la la. Didn't that make me sophisticated? Ha.

I wish I could rewrite the journals of young me and doing so, rewrite young me. I mean, not really, because I'm very happy with who and where I am now and I know it's that wending game-board trail of malarkey that brought me to this particular space, so I wouldn't actually back up and change anything even if I could. I'd be afraid things would arrange themselves differently and I might end up married to the wrong person, living in the wrong house, with the wrong dogs farting in their sleep! But I do wish I had been more like a character in a book.

I read young adult novels. Do you? I recommend them. There are incredibly fine books being written for young people. If you haven't seriously perused the YA section since you yourself were "y," you should. Things have changed since I was a teenager. Books are gritty now, about serious issues facing kids, and anything goes. (there is also "junior chic lit" which makes me shudder, it's SO inappropriate!) Well, I wish I had been like a character in a book, perhaps a bit offbeat and wrapped up in my own world, publishing underground literary journals in highschool and sneaking out in the middle of the night to plaster the school with stickers I had printed up with odd sayings on them. I wish I had played the ukulele to strangers on their birthdays or caused an explosion in the chemistry lab while discovering some heretofore unknown principle of... er... um... magnesium? (I don't really know what that is. I never ever took chemistry.) Instead, I was trying to make my bangs stand up straight like everyone else in Orange County in 1988. I had a crush on the quarterback from afar, like everybody else. I went to stupid loud parties I didn't enjoy, and pretended not to know my mohawked brother when I ran into him and his punk friends around town. College was better, but I could wish it was better-better. I mainly wish I hadn't cared about a) being fat, and b) boys so much. I might have gotten more done.

So what can we do about that when we grow up and find ourselves becoming less dumb at last? I admit to feeling some shame about how shallow I was, in a way feeling like that girl wasn't really "me." I don't want to disown young dumb me, not really.
I do have a bit of a fear of trying to "write" my children when I have them, though. Will I try to turn them into characters in books as they grow up? Try to make them more interesting than I was? Disdain them for being as shallow as I was? Urge them to take up the ukulele and publish a poetry journal? What's that quote? (Alexandra - help?) About the parent's unlived life being such a powerful force on the child? I can see it. My parents didn't do that to us, but I fear I might. I'll meddle. Even last night as Jim was working on an illustration I kept wanting to somehow jump into his brain so he'd do it just how I envisioned it; I'll want to do that with children too, about their lives! Plot them like books, design them like characters. I don't want to be a monster parent! I hope I will be able to control myself. I hope I will keep getting smarter.

Writing Room - coming soon!

Behold the green furniture! These wonderful shades of lime and chartreuse have been my favorite color for a few years now, and I had thought I might paint the guestroom-soon-to-be-writing-room that color... until I found this bench. Actually my mother found it at our favorite Portland gift store, Stella's (also the first store ever to carry my greeting cards when I took my first baby step towards commercial enterprise) and called me saying I MUST have it -- and my mother knows me. And now I DO have it! And THEN my sweet wonderful Jim surprised me with this matching writing desk for an early anniversary present -- thank you sweetie!! (Our 5th wedding anniversary is on thursday!) I am so in love with both of these pieces of furniture it is a kind of torture I don't yet have a fitting home for them. You see, I have decided to convert the seldom-used guestroom into a writing room. Yay! My long-awaited writing room. A few months ago I posted a meme that included 3 things you'd wish for just for yourself, and one of mine was a writing room, so this means a lot. (We DO already have an art studio but I don't really write in there because Jim & I share it and he likes to listen to political radio sometimes and I like to read my own words out loud to myself).

Well, the guest room is soon to undergo a transformation. I wish it only needed paint and love, but it in fact needs new walls, insulation, a new ceiling, and new french doors to the exterior. It needs to be gutted. Sigh. But I'm hiring someone to do it because my delusions of do-it-yourselfing ended years ago with dry-walling the art studio. Anyway, with the prevailing greenness of the furniture so far I think green walls would be overkill, but I'm thinking of a kind of pomegranate red. Yum. Also. there's the potential for a private little patio just outside the french doors, and I have visions of writing my next novel in there with the doors open and some long silky curtain billowing in. I'll post before and afters once this project is done. Wish me luck!

Speaking of writing, I've been having a great time working on the extended version of my short story The Hatchling that I originally wrote as Sunday Scribblings week #2, and I've written about 17 pages so far and LOVE it, but I have to set it aside now for something more important (and scary): I received my editorial feedback today from my publisher, so I'll be working on revisions to Blackbringer for the next... I don't know. Weeks? More? It's my first time doing this and I'm really nervous!

In other news, my Laini's Ladies Garden line is out in select stores. Yay! Unfortunately (or, fortunately) the first shipment sold out right away so they won't be available to order online until mid-July when the second shipment arrives from the factory. I heard today at Stella's that the line seemed to be doing really well at the Portland Gift Show over the weekend. I hope so. My new "Bohemian" holiday collection is also showing now. Here are a few sneak peeks:

Sunday Scribblings #10: Earliest Memory

We had a treehouse in front of our Navy-base row house when I was three and four. I had the croup when my father built it so I couldn’t go out and play but only watch my brother enviously through the window. My father had a beard then and it tickled. He took us fishing off Monterey Pier and I caught only baby octopi, time and again. I remember the way the ink bled out, like watercolors into a wash, when we’d toss them back.

I remember telling my first lie. I went to a Montessori preschool in Carmel and my teacher was lovely with straight yellow hippie hair down to her waist. I was banging ruthlessly on the piano keys one day and she complimented me, and I looked her straight in the eyes and thanked her, and said I was taking lessons. Not much of a lie, but I must have been pretty shocked with myself if I still remember telling it.

I remember being turned loose to play in a carpet warehouse. How the stacks and stacks of rolled carpets were like mountains and we were set free to scale them and leap between them. It was glorious.

Being small. When I sat down to write, this is what I was going to write about, then all the other memories came tumbling out too. It must have been the open house for my older brother’s kindergarten. There were corridors of a school with drawings on all the walls and grownups everywhere, standing around. I love this memory for my only physical recollection of what it was like to be that small. They were just legs, for all intents and purposes: grownups. And I was racing through this forest of legs with the other kids, and when I came to what I thought were my dad’s legs I flung myself into them, hard, flung my arms around them. Then I titled my head back and looked up, and I still remember gasping, the horror of it. It wasn’t my dad, but just another grownup in brown pants! Mortified, I ran on.

It’s funny how so many of these early memories have to do with my father. I think he was home all the time then since he was in graduate school, whereas in my few years up til then he’d been at sea a lot and it was just my mom and brother and me in our little house at the edge of the cane fields in Hawaii -- but I don’t have real memories of that time. After Monterey I remember a lot more, from first grade through fourth in Virginia, and Papa was gone a lot, plying the Atlantic in a Destroyer, I suppose. Of course Mom is always there, in all my memories. During these years she caught the houseplant mania that was sweeping the 1970s and our house began to turn into a jungle. Each time we moved for the rest of my youth she’d have to give her jungle away and rebuild it from scratch in the next house. And she was pregnant with my little sister, and my brother and I weren’t permitted in the hospital so my dad had to take us to the parking lot and point at her window. Funny, I get a little choked up thinking of that. Of needing that reassurance, to see that window among windows, and know she was there.

Want to read some more Sunday Scribblings?