YA Books for Adults

Raise your hand if this sounds like you:

You've read -- you've loved -- all the Harry Potter books. You mourn their passing. They opened up a whole world for you. But you. . . ahem. . . have for some reason not sought out any other “kids books” to read.

Is it true? Have you not? Why not? There’s a world of them, and here are some of my favorite “kids books” that are great reads for grownups too. This is only the tip of an iceberg -- there are so many other books I could put on this list. These are just stand-out faves that I have read more than once or will certainly read again. Beware, once you get yourself over to the YA section a teetering Rapunzel’s tower of books will tumble over and cascade into your life. I hope you’re ready!

FANTASY

His Dark Materials
by Philip Pullman
My favorite. Love, love, love. In the first book, The Golden Compass, Lyra is growing up under the not-so-watchful eyes of the scholars of a great Oxford college, in a just-off-kilter parallel reality to our own in which much is familiar, and much more is not. This book gets the highest praise I can come up with: I wish I'd thought of it myself! In it, humans have "daemons" which I can best describe as their souls made physical as animals, which are their constant companions and cannot be separated from them. Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon, journey with "gyptians" to the Arctic north to try to recover kids kidnapped by "the gobblers." There are witches, a creepy church doing dubious things, and an armored polar bear. Just read it, you.

The Goose Girl
by Shannon Hale
A beautifully written fairy tale retelling that goes far beyond the fairy tale. I love Shannon Hale's lyrical language and her world that feels both real and magical. This tale is romantic, earthy, funny, and a story of coming into one's own strength.




Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
Creepy cool. A door (that is only sometimes there) leads a young girl into a bizarro-world version of her own life. Haunting, strange, and smooth.








Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen
by Garth Nix
In a kingdom destroyed by necromancers, one person weilds the power to send the dead back to death where they belong: a young woman, who has inherited this duty from her father. Here's another concept that I would love to have come up with myself. I love these books and Garth Nix's dark, original fantasy world.


East
by Edith Pattou
Another fairy tale retelling that is so much more. This takes the cool old tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," a kind of journey-version of Beauty and the Beast, and really brings to life the Nordic world that it comes from. Trolls, polar bears, love, enchantment, courage, and beautiful writing.



A Certain Slant of Light
by Laura Whitcomb
This isn't fantasy the way the others are fantasy. It's contemporary and set in a very real American high school and household, except for one major thing: the main character is a ghost. But it's not like that. This is such a unique, compelling tale. In Whitcomb's world, ghosts have to attach themselves to human hosts; they are unseen hangers-on, and the young woman ghost is attached to a high school teacher. She's at the front of the class with him as usual when, to her great shock, she catches one of the students looking at her. Seeing her -- the first time she's been seen in over a hundred years. Why this seemingly ordinary young man can see her, and what happens next, makes for a great read that has stuck with me.


Dragon's Keep
by Janet Lee Carey
This book has the feel of being Carey's own offshoot to the Arthurian legend, but doesn't go into all that sword & stone stuff. Princess Rosalind is raised to believe she will be the one to fulfill a 600-year-old prophecy of Merlin's to restore her family to honor. She also has a secret: one of her fingers is not human, but dragon. She keeps it hidden always under a glove, but it is that finger, curiously, that will save her life from a dragon and suck her into the prophecy in ways she could never have guessed. Beautiful writing and a tight, fast, totally satisfying story.


Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer
by um, me
What sort of fool wouldn't put their own book here, I ask you? My first novel tells the story of Magpie Windwitch, a young faerie who's a devil hunter. The setting is our world, a world in which humans have been unwittingly releasing devils from their age-old prisons and unleashing, perhaps, a new devil age. The strength of faeries seems a thing of the past; the magic of the world is threadbare, and it seems a hopeless case. But Magpie won't give up without a fight, and the trail of the latest escaped devil leads her back to the mystical forest of Dreamdark, a place of legends and Djinn, cunning imps and tattooed warriors, and to revelations about her own role in the world.


NON-FANTASY

Anahita’s Woven Riddle
by Meghan Nuttal Sayres
A nomadic girl living in early 20th-century Persia, promised in marriage to a khan she doesn't love, makes a bargain with her parents: that whoever solves the riddle she weaves into her wedding carpet will become her husband. Besides the khan there are three suitors and the book is romantic and fun as a love story, but it also paints a picture of the lives of the nomads and their herds and traditions, with a lot of information about weaving and carpets and dyes that I found fascinating. I love me a Persian carpet.


Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind
by Suzanne Fischer Staples
This is perhaps a little bit more realistic a portrait of the life and choices of a nomadic Muslim girl who would like to marry for love (or not at all) but is not in command of her own fate. The world of camel-trading nomads in Pakistan is beautifully rendered, and the character Shabanu is a strong-willed girl in a place where that doesn't go over so well.


I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
Written in 1948 and set in England in the 1930s, this is the story of two young women swept away to live in a castle by their possibly mad writer-father. Castle living is not quite as romantic as one might think! The story takes a turn to romance when two American brothers inherit the estate on which the castle sits; it's not your typical love story, though. I came away thinking it was a lesson in how you can't control who you fall in love with, and chances are you won't fall in love with who you "should" and neither will they, etc etc. You have to read it to see what I'm talking about. Great quirky voice, too.


A Northern Light
by Jennifer Donnelly
Set in the Adirondacks of 1906 and imagining the real murder that was the basis of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The narrator, a girl working in a resort hotel for the summer to try to earn college tuition, witnesses the events surrounding the crime. This Printz-award (or honor) book is much more than a murder mystery, though. It's a window into a slice of American life, class, poverty, racism, dreams, and more. A memorable narrator, great writing.


A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama
by Laura Amy Schlitz
Great premise, great characters, great writing. Maud is an orphan in early 20th-century New England, and she is certainly not the most "adoptable" child in the place, having justifiable anger (and heartbreak) issues that I will not spoil here. However, her life takes a turn for the better when she is adopted by three elderly sisters and whisked away to a new life. It's a strange new life, though, and Maud will soon enough find out just why the sisters have adopted her and what her role is to be in their peculiar family.


Hattie Big Sky
by Kirby Larson
A Newbery honor book this year, this is the story (based on the true story of the author's grandmother) of a sixteen-year-old girl homesteading alone in Montana during World War I. Wow, I would not want to do that. Montana winters, prairie life, anti-German sentiment, the nature of friendship, hope, spunk, a great narrative voice. A fast, sweet, gripping read.

[You may note that these are pretty much all fantasy or historical fiction. That's pretty much what I go for, but there are also many awesome contemporary mainstream YA books. If you haven't taken a good look at the YA section in the bookstore in the past, say, ten years or so: DO. Have fun!]

[Alexandra has asked me to add that her favorite YA novel ever is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which I have no doubt will make it onto my list too, but that I haven't read it yet.]

Flail harder.

Me: Head, meet brick wall. Brick wall, head.

Head: Oh, thanks, but we've met before. Many times.

Brick Wall: Old friends, head and I.

Yep. Here's the thing. You'd think if a person rammed their head into a brick wall over and over, it would be the head that would break -- with deep melonish resonance -- and the wall would stay standing. However, I think it can be proven that in the case of writers, the head can bring down the wall. At least, so it has been for me in the past, so I think it is today, and I hope it continues so in the future. If I just keeping hurling myself at my novel, I will get through it, head intact.

This is all a way of saying, if you're flailing with your writing and you don't think it's possible you'll ever break through your block: flail harder. Flail wilder. Sing while you flail.

My blogging has been taking a backseat to my flailing this week, and the flailing shows signs of paying off. I was having a heck of a time getting through a particular chunk of scenes, but I think I have. I tried a new strategy: index cards. Earth-shaking, I know. I've contemplated trying them before. I've oohed and aahed over the cards pinned to other writers' walls, laying their novel out before their complacent eyes, scene by scene. Pretty, I thought. Perhaps the reason I had not tried it was because I suspected, knowing myself a little, that what I really wanted was to go buy index cards, because let's face it, buying even the most ordinary of office supplies is fun.

And it was kind of fun. They come in colors, and I got some of those, but I got the white ones too, and then I had to come up with a plan of how I was going to use them, and I thought I'd better start at the beginning and I did, and made a card for each scene that I have already written, which was easy, and I got to watch them stack up nicely, and then came the hard part: the new stuff. The stuck stuff. But I did it. I plotted out a new plan for the stuck stuff, just for the pleasure of printing new scenes up at the tops of new index cards, and the ideas fell into place, and I started to get excited.

And here I am now, with a stack of index cards and a tingle of excitement, the kind you get setting out on a journey when a new place is still just words on a map and you know it's all ahead of you.

It's not about the index cards. I know that. It's just another way of hurling myself at the brick wall. Another way of pretending that flailing is really dancing, and that I'm in control.

Ha.

Oh. My. Gosh.

So there are these two guys who raised this lion, and then they released it into the wild (or semi-wild). A year later, they were reunited:

This is the most wonderful video I've ever seen. Can you stand it? Can you believe it? I found it on my friend Kristy's blog, and then I just had to learn once and for all how to post a video on blogger. This is my first time. At first, it seemed really tricky, and then I realized it is actually as easy as posting a photo; I had just assumed it would be hard and hence I made it hard.

I could watch this again and again. I want to cuddle a lion!

Not for ROBOTS!

What's not for robots? My new site is not for robots! It's for writers.

It's not a blog exactly. I'm not planning on updating it (just perhaps refining it over time); it's really just a place to post a series of essays on writing that I've been working on. Now they're up, and you can read them if -- that's right -- if you're not a robot. (To me, people who write with ease are robots.)

The awesome robot art is by none other than my husband-slash-art monkey, Jim. He has an ease and fluency with drawing robots that is a little suspicious. I mean, I begin to wonder if he might not be a robot himself. Hm. Given my no-robot policy, this would be a problem, so I think I won't investigate the matter further. Don't ask, don't tell -- that's my new robot policy. 'Kay?

If you have any curiosity to peer inside the mind of this screwball writer and learn all the crafty tricks I have to use on myself to keep myself writing, then go HERE. Let me know what you think. . . unless it's mean, in which case, go away!

Cheers!

Meet Happy German Penguin!

I just got word that Penguin has sold the German rights for Blackbringer and Silksinger too. Wheeee!!! That is my first foreign rights sale and I hope there will be many more to come. I love buying children's books when I travel to other countries -- I especially love picture books that are not only in other languages but in other alphabets. Some day I hope to see MY books in exotic, beautiful alphabets, too. The jumping-for-joy German penguin above is by Jim, who is answering to the term "art monkey" today after he did another important drawing for me yesterday, which I will show very soon. We hope there will eventually be a whole tribe of "international happy penguins" to join the one above. Each foreign rights sale, we (my art monkey and I) will add another penguin drawing. When the audio rights are sold (in the works), I envision a Penguin wearing headphones. Ha ha!

Good day to all!

P.S. Today also marks the 9-year anniversary of the day Jim and I met! It was the first day of art school in San Francisco, and early this morning nine years ago, we parked next to each other in the parking lot and then ended up in the same illustration class. . . where we were assigned to draw each other! And here we are now, married, with me begging him to draw me penguins and robots!

Cupcakes & Mountain Lions, or: the bride had a snake tattoo. . .

Woo hoo! There's my baby sister Emily losing her garter to her new husband Marty on Saturday, August 25, 2007, in Paso Robles, California. Love that snake tattoo! In the past I have called Emily a "snake doctor" -- but in reality what she is is a PhD in biology who did her dissertation on rattlesnakes, and who happens to love the beasties. Fortunately, Marty loves them too -- a match made in Heaven (or at least, a match made in the Arizona desert!). Their living room and study are both dominated by custom cabinets filled with snakey after rattling snakey. At the wedding, the only snakes around were the ones on the wine glasses -- here is the art Jim did for them:

Funnily, when the glasses arrived, there were a few stuck in there from "Kate and Dean's Wedding" or some normal thing, and we were laughing to imagine Kate and Dean pulling rattlesnake glasses out of their own order!

So, there were no real snakes at the wedding, but there was a mountain lion skulking nearby. When we gals drove back in to the ranch Friday night after our "bachelorette party" we saw very plainly a very large mountain lion in the brush, only a few yards from where our husbands were gathered around the campfire. Yeeks! We could see its tail swishing as it prowled away. After that, the younger children were kept close. I was thrilled by the glimpse, though, and this makes it extra cool: at the wedding of Emily's best friends, Dawn & Rob, a few years ago in the Sonoran Desert, a bobcat prowled right past in a dry creekbed, just minutes before the ceremony began, in full view of all the guests. So, Emily and Dawn both have some kind of big cat karma, I guess.

And besides the mountain lion, there was a pig very much in attendance. Her name is Polly By Golly and she lives on site and wanders happily around, grunting.

Here's the spot, The Dancing Horse Ranch, in the middle of Central California wine country:



And here's the wedding:




Don't they look great? This was surely the first time many of the guests had seen Emily in makeup and a dress -- she's a very outdoorsy biologist-type girl, and she looked so beautiful! She got that stunning dress here in Portland from a designer on NW 23rd St. It's hand-painted silk from India. Lovely! And her hair was done by my Aunt Joyce, who was also my bridal fairy godmother.

Here's my extended family, my parents and siblings and niece and husband and honorary family members, Dawn and Rob:

It was an informal, non-religious ceremony, without a minister. Dawn was the "rev" as we called her, just as Emily was for her wedding. It makes things personal and very lovely. (I want to say thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions for readings! There were some terrific suggestions, and I ended up reading from Poetry & Marriage by Wendell Berry, as suggested by blue poppy, and Dawn incorporated the final two stanzas from Marge Piercy's The Implications of One + One** into the ceremony. I love that poem -- thanks, Tinker, for pointing me to it! And thanks to everyone else too. Marty's sister read the fabulous passage from The Velveteen Rabbit about becoming "real" -- if you haven't read it in a while, check it out.)

The bride and groom with their parents:


And lots more pictures:
Me and Jim and my freshly empinked hair:

Me with my brother and sister (Alex looking thrilled to be with us):

He looks a lot happier here, with his daughter, Isabella:


Something you see a lot of at weddings, nieces in pretty dresses:

And here's Marty, who has "a way with the ladies":

Smooch:

And more and more:






(Acting out the song "Kung Fu Fighting" -- )

Oh, and did I mention there were cupcakes?


**from "The Implications of One + One" by Marge Piercy:
Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.

One plus one equal one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amen.

HOME AT LAST!!!

WE'RE HOME! AT LAST!
HALLELUJA, WE'RE HOME!!!!!!!!

We've been away five weeks. Summer is almost over. We've been gone a long time! Yesterday we drove 800 miles back from Central California to Portland, and you know what?

Oregon is BEAUTIFUL!! Oregon is HOME. It's so green, so wild. I love it! And our house! Our little yellow house was just sitting here waiting for us! My writing room, where I am right now, the room I decided I deserved after writing my first book -- we converted it from an ugly old spare bedroom into something wonderful (with the help of an awesome carpenter and some very bright paint and green furniture and polka dots.)

I am SO ready to be back to work!!! And look, my writing room has a new resident:

She's a decal; we got her at Comic-Con. Isn't she wonderful? My own little devil muse.

So, today we have to pick up the mail and scour through it for bills that might be overdue, and we have to get groceries and do laundry, but other than that. . . we're HOME and back to WORK. Yipppeeeeeeee!!!

I will post photos of my sister's wedding tomorrow, I think. It was fabulous in every way, and now she and her new husband are off in Belize on a teeny tiny island where they will not be able to hunt for reptiles for a whole week! (And then next week they will be inland, probably with a snake in one hand and a lizard in the other!)

I will show these photos now, though:


Our first night in San Luis Obispo, Jim and I had dinner with local residents the Disco Mermaids: Eve, Robin, and Jay. I've been reading their blog for a while now, since I first began discovering the treasure trove of kidlit & writing blogs out there. Jay Asher (the mermale) is my "Penguin '07 brother" -- I mentioned his terrific book Thirteen Reasons Why a few weeks ago (it's out in October). Well, we got to meet them in L.A., and I'm very glad we saw them again in San Luis, away from the madness of the conference. Fabulous dinner, local wine, wicked ice cream, Robin's adorable son Luke, and lots of great talk about writing and life. They are so lucky to have such a tight-knit writing group/friendship. I am envious. I have always been a hermit-variety writer, and the few attempts I've made at being part of a writer's group have not fared terribly well. But I read and hear about other writers' groups and fun retreats and I get jealous. Maybe some day! Maybe my best friend will even one day let me read her writing. (hint hint)

Okay, that's my quick catch-up post. Some of my 350 wedding photos tomorrow (not all, I swear!)

Cheers!

P.S. I have a new item to add to my list of "reasons to become a famous writer" -- apparently, they get to hold panda bears on their laps!!!

Big Trees

Yep, these trees are big. Looky:



This one is the biggest tree in the world, the General Sherman Sequoia:


When you're standing by it -- or rather, by the fence that prevents you from getting too close to it -- it's hard to believe it could be not merely the largest tree, but the biggest living thing in the entire world. How crazy is that? Looking at it, standing by it, somehow, it doesn't seem that big. It's not the tallest tree (it's "only" 275 ft), and it doesn't have the biggest circumference ("only" 102 feet), but all in all it manages to have the highest volume of wood in cubic feet: 52,508. And it's not that it's not impressive, it's just that somehow my brain couldn't really compute that it was that big. I had the same feeling at the Grand Canyon, but for a different reason. I mean, the Grand Canyon does look that big. So big, in fact, that its depth kind of flattens itself out, like the human eye can't quite. . . I don't know, triangulate something of that scope. But the Sherman tree wasn't quite as impressive as I expected.

But what was impressive was just walking through the Giant Forest. The trees in the Giant Forest don't have fences around them like the General Sherman do, and you can get close, and also, they're all around you, making you feel the size of a bug. The overall effect is incredible.

This is all at Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevadas. Sequoia is adjacent to King's Canyon National Park, which is vast and does not appear to be crossed by a single road. I could be wrong, but on the map it doesn't look like it. Being up in the mountains on a day trip, hitting only high-volume tourist sites, really made me want to go on a backcountry trip, which I've done only a couple of times in my life. I always want to start camping again, but we just haven't gotten around to it, and dang it, that must change.

Some basic Sequioa facts: they are not the same thing as redwood trees. A lot of people think they are; they're related but distinct. Redwoods grow only at the coast. Sequoias grow nowhere else on Earth but here in the Sierras, at around 6500 feet. Unlike redwoods. they are brittle and make crap lumber. In fact, when they topple, they tend to bust into a bunch of pieces. (Idiots logged the hell out of them anyway.) They are virtually indestructible. They're highly fire-resistant, they self-heal from forest fires (which are an essential part of their ecology and the main way their seeds are released from their cones) and are totally pest-resistant. The only natural cause of death of a Sequoia is toppling, which is not unusual, since they are really big and have really shallow roots, like redwoods, which are likened to a pin standing on its head.

Here are the roots of a toppled giant (and me and my brother-in-law Perry):


In the 19th century, folks back on the East Coast flat didn't believe reports that trees grew in California with a diameter of 20-30 feet. They didn't even believe the photos. So what do you think people did? They cut down trees and hauled cross-sections all the way across the continent in ox carts. But the cross sections were too dang big for ox carts, so the people had to cut them up and reassemble them. And of course, since they were in pieces, people didn't even believe they were from one single tree! Many of these tree chunks still remain in museums. (Feh.)

Since Sequoia wood doesn't decay, it's impossible to tell the age of a toppled giant. Many such trees are strewn around the Giant Forest, and no one knows how long they've lain there. Many are hollow and they're huge inside:

One was used as a stable and could hold over 20 horses! Twenty horses inside one hollow tree!

I love trees. I read a book recently I keep meaning to blog about -- I keep meaning to write an "Earth's Greatest Hits" about trees, but I haven't gotten around to it -- the books is The Wild Trees, and it's about the botanists who pioneered redwood canopy ecology in the 1990s. Until then, no one had climbed a redwood to see what was up there!!! On a mature redwood tree, the first branches that can bear a person's weight occur at the equivalent of the 20th floor of a building (geez!) so they're, um, not easy to climb. This book goes into the way this group of botanists gradually figured out how to climb them with relative safety (it's still crazy-unsafe. don't try it.) and it's a very exciting book. Read it! There's lots of obsession in it, as well as really cool trees, and it's a love story too. Cool!

Here are Jim and Perry eating ice cream at Lodgepole Visitor Center -- Jim's wearing my sunglasses.


And the very polite trash cans in the park:


Go hug a tree! Ooh, that reminds me of a very lame bumper sticker I saw on a teenager's car here in Flat City. It said, "Tree-huggers suck." What? In what possible vision of the Universe do tree-huggers suck? Tree-hugger-haters suck! Hug a tree-hugger!

Joy & Stuff

So, what do you do for a wedding reading at the wedding of people who aren't "gushy"? The wedding of a couple of snake-wrangling science types who would probably snort if you started to say, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. . ." or anything like that. Yes, I'm talking about my snakey sister, whose wedding invitations (drawn by Jim and I) had a lizard on them, and whose wedding wine glasses bear a design of intertwined rattlesnakes (drawn by Jim) -- I'd post those images, but I'm still on the alien computer! "Wedding poetry" is gushy, old-fashioned stuff, mostly. Not their thing. So I've been looking for something a little more appropriate, and I'm not sure exactly what I'll read yet, but today at the bookstore I got lost in poetry.

Been a while since that happened. I'm pro-poetry, but I just haven't had the time for it in a while, I guess. Or made the time. When you feel like you don't have time and you crack open a poetry book, you can't really read it, you sort of look at it, but that's different. When you do really read it, settle into it, it can kind of tackle you with the fresh realization of how magnificent, how limber, how glittering, is language. I browsed through a lot of books and culled bits from here and there, but there was one anthology called Dancing With Joy, that has so many brilliant joyful poems in it. I just have to pass on some lines found in this and other books:

"Jump into experience while you are alive!
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?"
- Kabir

". . .We must risk delight.
We can do without pleasure, but not delight.
We must have the stubborness to accept our gladness
in the ruthless furnace of this world. . ."
- Jack Gilbert, from A Brief for the Defense

"Suddenly I realized that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom."
- James Wright, from A Blessing

"The body does not wear out with
use, nor does love, so let us
use each other in the best of ways
as the hours jump off the cliff."
- Marge Piercy, from The Real Hearth

from Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for--
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy. . .

from Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

These are days we live
as if death was nowhere,
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

And man, if I haven't lost you yet, check out this depiction of a blissful girl:

Grammar
by Tony Hoagland
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair,looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy.

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

Cripes. Dude can write!

Any ideas for a great non-gushy wedding reading will be appreciated!

I treated myself to a dress from Anthropologie to wear to the wedding; it's blue-violet and so cute, and today I found some great, unexpected shoes to go with. I think I've found a stylist to pinken up my hair on monday, and tomorrow, Jim and I are going to Sequoia National Park to see the world's largest tree, amid many of the world's almost-largest trees! I can't WAIT! Hope you have a great weekend too!

Summer places

I feel like we're in limbo, these weeks we are passing in "Flat City" -- it's strange. The reason we're here is because it seemed silly to drive all the way back to Oregon for a week or two then turn around and drive all the way back for my sister's wedding out in San Luis Obispo. It seemed reasonable to stay here -- we mostly have Jim's mom's house to ourselves, it's spacious and cool, and we can work. And it's fine.

But I was just thinking about "summer" and what that meant when I was a kid. Clicking around to various blogs, I see vacation pics of kids at lakes and beaches, smiling, fishing, playing with their cousins, doing summery stuff, and I am launched back to childhood summers and how GREAT they were. How golden. I want that again. For all the years since college came to its unceremonious end, plunking me into the working world, I've been missing that golden stretch of months. I want to recreate those summers as an adult. If/when we have kids, I definitely want them, but I also want them NOW.

For the past few years, summer has been nothing special -- we go on some fun "work" trips like SCBWI and Comic-Con, and maybe to the Oregon Coast for a weekend, and that's about it; we always ending up working a lot, like the deadlines pile up in the summer. What I am itching for is that drained, contented feeling I used to get as a kid, walking the two blocks home from the beach late in the afternoon, my hair crunchy with dried salt, sand between my toes. I'd stop home for a shower and dinner and then head back out for the "passegiata" with friends -- that's when Italians go strolling in the evenings to have a gelato and greet everyone they know. I want a real summer. A vacation house somewhere with a world to lazily explore. A dock with a kayak on it, quiet water, a long trail through a forest, a country store, a cool bottle of wine on a deck. A stack of fat books, a frisbee, a happy, tired dog or two. A hammock.

Weeks of it. Yeah. That's summer. I want to vow to do that next year, somewhere, to rent a house for, say, three weeks, somewhere warm but not too hot, with a body of water -- could be lake, river, or ocean. It has to be beautiful and just the right mix of laziness and activity. Where should we go? Any ideas?

Where are some of your favorite "summer places"?

Psychic conditioner

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

(Hi Em!)

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

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

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

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

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

Me: "Um. Yeah?"

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

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

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

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