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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

All you Need Are:

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

Preheat oven to 350.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

More pictures at the Mosque de Paris:



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

1) ANNECY

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



2) CHAGALL MUSEUM

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


3) ROTHSCHILD VILLA

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

4) ICE CREAM

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

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

Japanese zombie baseball? Plus, some thoughts on writing productivity

Because why not?

Ha ha, here's the synopsis:

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

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

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

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

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

That is all. Beware zombie baseball players. Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

A few other little thingamies:

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy day, all!

Photo Catch-Up

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

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





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

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

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

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

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



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

And some days I want to kiss my brain

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

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

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

(What? Nothing.)

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

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

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

Smooch smooch.

How to mend a broken brain

Some days are like this:


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


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

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

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

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

Coolest Video Ever

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

Berry Face + Writing in the Spirit of Discovery

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

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

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

Writing scenes in the spirit of discovery.

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

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

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

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

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

We just hope it's not 10,000!

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

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

A trio of YA debuts

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

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

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

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

2) Millions of dollars in compensation. Millions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavy.

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

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

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

So much for normal.

Enjoy!

MY NEW BOOK IS ANNOUNCED!

YayyyyyyyyyYAAAAAAYaAaAaAaAaAaAyYyYyYyY!!!!!!

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next blog entry, incidentally:

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Did you know strawberries could be RED in the middle?

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

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

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

Flying brain-men and impending doom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:-)

Goblin Shark Madness!

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

Paris Christmas in June

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

little painting

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

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

Cheers!

Have fun AND be awesome!

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

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

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

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

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

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