Thoughts on Revisions

Here are some things I've learned to do when working on revisions:

Pretend like someone else wrote it.

If you can detatch from your manuscript and look at it with the cool eyes of a stranger, you'll be more able to do what needs to be done. Don't let yourself remember the joy and pain of creating that particular character or chapter. You're the calm, cool stranger reading this book for the first time. Even better: you're like the scary mercenary that gets hired in a movie when a hit goes wrong, like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, the one that can fix anything. Yeah, that's you, the scary mercenary who can fix anything -- and isn't going to get all weepy and mopey about it.

Be willing to change anything. Anything.

Don't cling. You're not married to that first draft. That first draft is more like a first date, and you get to go on lots more dates before you decide whether you're going to marry it. (I realize now this is not a good metaphor. I am not advocating you try to fix the people you date and turn them into your perfect mate. It doesn't work with people. But it does work with manuscripts. Yay!)

Remember: your book can get better. And better. And better.

It's unlikely your first idea is the best possible idea for any given situation. Revisions are an opportunity to take a raw thing and make it SO. MUCH. BETTER. Don't just fiddle around with the sentences as you've written them. Cast your mind out wide for any new ideas that might make your story more exciting, more beautiful, more whatever. Be willing to rewrite A LOT, to cut whole chapters and write whole new chapters.

A quote:

"It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it." -- Mark Twain

Love that. Dance on your mind. Go forth and revise.

Oh yeah, and:

"It is never too late -- in fiction or in life -- to revise." -- Nancy Thayer

Lips Touch

Lips Touch. That is the new title for Goblin Fruit -- probably. I really like it. It's a book about kissing, after all, and "lips touch" sounds sexy, but still kind of abstract. And, it's true: in this book, lips do touch. It's also the 2nd line from the story "Spicy Little Curses Such As These," one of the book's three tales. So, that's the new title, unless it gets changed again!

(None of the lips are orangutan lips, by the way, though now I think of it, there is an orangutan reference in one story. Not a kissing orangutan, though. Something much worse!)

I am massively in revision mode now, and on TWO BOOKS.
Though there was oodles of time for these two books --Silksinger and Goblin Fruit Lips Touch -- to get spaced out at decent intervals, I kind of knew I would end up getting my editorial letters for both at the same time (that's Lips Touch on top, Silksinger on the bottom -- word of advice: write short books. They're so neat and tidy!). But it's okay: one is a very light edit, which is wonderful, because the other is a very not-light edit! I fully expected that, though, and fully embrace it, and feel so grateful to have someone (several someones) to read my manuscripts so closely, with so much care to helping me make a book the best it can be. I do not say this to suck up. I'm pretty sure neither of my editors reads this blog, and I think they both know how much I love the revision process -- really, really, and truly.

Right now, with the task of carving 20,000 words off Silksinger (!!!), I am full of excitement about diving back in and making the book much better than it is now. Yippeeeee! Let me at it! Wooo hooooooo! {I'm seriously not joking. Give me revisions over a first draft. First drafts are the terrifying part! I did hear a good quote at the conference, though: "Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist." -- Jane Smiley} Well, these first drafts exist and will soon become second drafts. All the fun and excitement of travel and conferences are now in the past, and I will be spending much, much time in my writing room for the next several months!

By the way, Iron Man rocks. Here I am with Liesa, James, and Iron Man at dinner before going to see the movie on opening night.
There was a little boy at the next table who was seriously coveting our toy. We play-blasted him with the blasty thingy. Here is Jim pretending Iron Man is a cell phone. Don't even try to tell me you don't do that too.

Chiapas Trip Part 3 - Palenque and the jungle/ Chiapas Travel

All is not yet told with our trip to Mexico. So far we have wandered around San Cristobal eating walnut popsicles and banana soup, attended strange religious rites in a Mayan village church, waded in a waterfall (when we really should have swum), spooked some crocodiles off some river banks, and consumed our weight in mangoes (daily). Next stop: the Lacandon rainforest and the ancient Mayan city of Palenque.

The Lacandon is the western hemisphere's most significant rainforest north of the Amazon, and is home to a huge percentage of Mexico's biodiversity. Jaguars, ocelots, howler monkeys, toucans, crocodiles, and many other exciting beasties, not to mention Zapatistas. Of course, we saw almost none of those things in our brief excursion to the jungle -- just howler monkeys, but that was what I most wanted to see, so it's okay.

Let me begin telling this story by saying that our first four days in Chiapas, the weather was perfect. Blue skies and all. And whenever we would meet a traveler who'd come from Palenque, they'd say, without exception, "It is SO HOT. Rivers of sweat. Streaming, dripping sweat." And other graphic descriptions of amounts of sweat. I was a little trepidatious about this, not being a sweat-lover, but I was game for the jungle -- eager for the jungle -- and I figured sweat was just part of the scene. So.

When we woke early early to catch our bus, and it was raining quite heavily, I was not afraid. We had a five-hour drive ahead of us. I guess I just assumed there was a little patch of rain hovering over San Cristobal, but that our bus would drive away from it, and then it would be sunny. The first problem was that our van was full, and it being full, there was no room in it for our backpacks. The backpacks had to go on top. In the rain. "There is a cover," said the driver, proceeding to climb up on top and start arranging said cover. It seems to me now quite ominous in retrospect, that he did not want any of us to help him, or even to watch him. Could that be because the cover didn't. . . cover? Well.

We drove, and drove. The roads in Chiapas are not only snakey-curvy, but they are fraught with speedbumps. More speedbumps that you have ever seen in your life. You're zooming along, then you squeal to a stop for another series of speedbumps. You jounce around a lot. It's fine. You get used to it. There are a lot of little villagey encampments right alongside the road, a lot of strolling livestock, hence the bumps. We drove. The rain did not abate.

We reached our first stop of the day, the long-anticipated Agua Azul waterfall, where I had hoped to fulfill the "swim in a waterfall" dream (well, I have swum in waterfalls, in Hawaii and here in Oregon, but I really really wanted to swim here. Look how blue this is, how beautiful. . .



Um, I got those photos off Google. Here's what it looked like when we were there:

Not azul. Not on April 14, 2008! Oy. What you can't tell from this photo is what I had to go through to get this photo. See, the rain had flooded the waterfall. The river had leapt its banks and turned all the pathways into rivers, all the stairways into waterfalls. To even get to the viewpoints we had to walk upstream against the tide of these newborn little rivers, and they were brown and powerful and you couldn't see where you were stepping and. . . people started falling into holes.

The local kids could have stopped it, they could have called out, "No, not that way!" but they didn't. They sat back and howled with laughter. It was pretty funny. Until, er, I fell in the water! Oy, up to my waist. And I was wearing jeans. Soaked, heavy jeans! Bleh. And that was to be the extent of the "swimming" at Agua Azul! DRAT!

At our next stop, the waterfall of Misol Ha, I bought a skirt so that I could change out of my jeans. It was a cute skirt, too! But I needn't have bothered -- we went on to Palenque and by the time we'd been there for ten minutes, I was entirely drenched again! It was the most extraordinary rain I have ever encountered. It was ludicrous rain. The sky was just plain showing off. You really couldn't see. The whole world was a waterfall. And here we were, at Palenque, a wonder of the ancient world, a once-in-a-lifetime (maybe) trip! What to do? Well, of course we had to go and see what we could, rain or not. So we bought cheapo ponchos and waded in.

Remember what everyone told us about Palenque? How hot? Streams of sweat? Not so much! Oh my GOD. The rain. Everywhere the standing water was well above our ankles and we slogged through, laughing hysterically inside our ponchos, looking like a little troupe of wet hunchback ghosts. Here we are:
And here's beautiful, mysterious Palenque, lost in the mist:
Well, on a normal day, so we're told, Palenque gets between 1400 and 6000 tourists tramping around. This day, there were about 5. At the time it was comical, but now I feel like we were lucky to witness such a ferocious act of nature, and to have this spot to ourselves.

Did I mention that they haven't had this sort of out-of-season storm in over 20 years? Ha! Well, we were also told that as insane as the rain was, it was just "a shower" compared to the storms of late summer. Wow.

And the best part of the day was yet to come. After we'd finished our slog and were about to get back on the bus, the rain abated almost entirely and a series of incredibly eerie roars started to echo through the trees. Monkeys! Yay, yay, yay! Monkeys! They're called "howler" monkeys, but this is an incredible misnomer. They don't howl. They ROAR. They sound like monsters, and they were all around, roaring back and forth. We could see them moving through the treetops and the sound, it was just insanely alien and freaky and COOL. It made my day.

The day ended at El Panchan, which is a kind of "backpacker village" in the jungle just a few kilometers away from Palenque:
Set amid dense trees and a crisscrossing of streams, there are a number of hostels and cabanas, and a really really good restaurant called Don Mucho's, where you sit under a thatched palapa and listen to really really good live music while drinking cervezas and maragaritas and eating delicious "Mexican-Italian food."
It's really very good that there was this pleasant end to the day, even if I had to go to dinner dressed in Jim's swim trunks and oversize sweatshirt because my own clothes were ruined. Ruined. As expected, my backpack was wet. Not just wet: saturated. Everything in it could have just been fished out of a river, that's how wet. And that's not all. The new scarf I had bought at the market in San Cristobal had bled blue all over everything. I now was the owner of many extremely wet, extremely tie-tyed clothes! And my brand-new hair dryer was dead, so I couldn't even dry my wet soppy hair! Oh. If it wasn't for the good food, the cervezas and the margarita, I would probably have cried. At least El Panchan is just the kind of place where you can go to dinner in your husband's swim trunks and no one will think anything of it!

Here's adorable little "Nyeli," who's half-Tsotsil/half-Canadian, and who just loves to dance:
To wrap up the rest of the tale in a quick and slap-dash way, we spent the next day at the gorgeous ruins of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, deeper down in the Lacandon. Look at this ENORMOUS TREE. It makes me feel like a fairy!We took a river trip along the Usumacinta, which makes the border with Guatemala, we heard a whole lot more howler monkeys, and ended the day once more with good music, good food, cervezas, and margaritas under a palapa in the jungle. Oh yeah, there was chocolate cake too!

And the next day, with sun shining, we returned to Palenque and really saw it. It was gorgeous, the weather was perfect, and it wasn't even hot or humid! We hired a guide and he told us a lot of interesting history and identified trees and bird sounds (heard toucans, didn't see them), and all in all, it was beautiful. Here's the biggest pyramid; the red circle is there for scale (there's a wee little person inside it!)



And that's our trip to the jungle! Next time I go somewhere with jungle, I really want to experience JUNGLE. I want to take a Sierra Club trip or something, camp in a jungle, ride an elephant, see huge creepy spiders, that sort of thing. (Jim might not so much want that, though). But this was a glimpse, and good to get it now. Sadly, the Lacandon is being cut down at an absolutely alarming rate, like every other forest in the world. If you want to see trees, you should probably see them soon.

{If you didn't know this, you should: Bush is pushing hard to log Sequoia National Monument. Yah. Sequoia National Monument. Whaaa? Now is a really time to become a Sierra Club member and help combat this insanity.}

Imagine cupcakes

Not this cupcake**. This is made of felt. The ones that are made of sugar and buttercream and other edible (but inadvisable) things, you have to imagine, because I didn't have my camera with me today when Jim and I and new friends Liesa and James happened upon Cupcake Jones in the Pearl District. The moment I saw the cupcakes through the window... I knew they were no ordinary cupcakes. Listen to this, and conjure the image in your head:

baklava cupcake -- cardamom cake filled with honey pistachio pastry cream topped with honey pistachio buttercream, candied pistachios and filo wedges. Uh huh. That's what I had. Well, that's what I had first.

snickers cupcake -- caramel velvet cake filled with whipped chocolate peanut ganache topped with caramel buttercream, chocolate and caramel drizzles and chopped peanuts. That's what I had second.

Yum.

And listen to what's on the menu for later in the week: "Mallomar cupcake with homemade marshmallows and graham crackers," a "linzer cookie cupcake" -- that one involves brown sugar hazelnut cake. Brown sugar hazelnut cake? Oh. Yum. And, oh my god, they make an "almond joy" cupcake, chocolate filled with coconut cream topped with almond buttercream frosting. Ack! I'm getting fat just thinking about these!

Calm down, Laini. Calm.

Well, we had a really nice afternoon, cupcakes and books and Vietnamese food with new friends. We met Liesa and James at the conference last weekend, and they are spending a few days in Portland before heading home to New York/New Jersey, so we got to hang out. Liesa is an editor at Simon and Schuster, and it was fun going through the YA and Middle Grade sections at Powell's with her; I bought a couple of books she's edited. It was also fun seeing James' eyes bug out when he discovered the photography section. Powell's = Paradise. In the event of an apocalypse, that is where I want to be, and if at all possible, I'd like for the Whole Foods and Cupcake Jones to remain fully operational (okay, and Anthropologie too). Apocalypse Schmocalypse. Yes?

Belatedly, a few blog posts by attendees of the conference last weekend. It was really great to meet both Stephanie and Elise. I look forward to reading your books, as soon as may be! (Oh, and: Stephanie has blue hair. Yay!)

**For the adorable felty cupcakes pictured above, click here.

THE SECRET TO GETTING PUBLISHED WILL BE REVEALED IN THIS POST

Yes, I am going to tell you the secret to getting your book published, but first, before anything else, don't you think you have to have this T-shirt? Go HERE.

Okay. I'm feeling a little emotional and a lot grateful right now at the end of another SCBWI weekend. It's been a new kind of SCBWI experience for me: one that involved not so much helping my dreams come true, as, well, my dream has already come true, and now here I am, up on the spotlight-side of the podium! Me! And of course, my dream of becoming a published writer would not have come true if not for all the SCBWI conferences in which I was on the listening side, the scribbling notes side, the yearning side. I mean that from the bottom of my soul. When asked about my path to publication, the answer is so simple:

SCBWI

I've written about this here before, but I think it bears telling again, especially in the light of the extraordinary full-circle that this weekend brought me in Bellevue, Washington. So here goes.

Seven years ago I splurged to go the national summer conference of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators in Los Angeles. I couldn't really afford it, but Jim and I had just gotten married, and I think we actually used some money that we'd gotten as a wedding gift so that I could do it. Looking back, I know I had dreams that I would be discovered by an editor or an art director and get an assignment to illustrate a children's book. That didn't happen. It didn't happen the next summer either, incidentally, when I went back again.

Something else happened. I learned to become a better illustrator, a harder worker, and most importantly... to rediscover myself as a writer.

A writer is what I am. I remember that now. But seven years ago I was in the midst of a long detour away from writing into illustration (a detour I am glad I took, by the way), and I had to find my way back to myself. AND... I had to learn how to write a book! (Minor detail!) I started going to SCBWI conferences hoping to learn the secret to getting published, and I did learn it. The secret is...

{drumroll please}

Write a really good book!

Mo Willems touched on this in his keynote address this weekend, in his hilarious way of being glib but deeply true at the same time. He said that all you need to know to get published is: BE SUPERLATIVE. Teachers in art school told us the same thing. Good work will rise to the top. Work hard. Do good work. Duh, right? Yeah, but I had to stumble onto this secret by going to workshops on craft, in between the workshops I thought I needed, which were the ones on how to get published. We conference attendees partly go to these things for the chance to meet editors face-to-face and hope they might publish our book; if we're really lucky, we might wander into a workshop where a writer tells us something that will help us make our book better, and better, and better, and hopefully, finally, worthy of publication. It happened to me. That workshop was taught by Dan Greenburg and I scribbled notes the whole time, a sudden fire of understanding lit in my brain, and when the conference was over I sat up on the hotel terrace in the Los Angeles late-afternoon sun, had a glass of wine, and rewrote those notes into my first Dreamdark notebook, the notebook in which Blackbringer was just beginning to take shape, and I asked myself questions that Dan had put in my head, and my book took a massive stride toward the next level. (Thank you, Dan!)

Those notes are still there on pages 10 and 11 of that notebook, that same notebook from which I read a [different] passage yesterday while teaching my first workshop on writing at the SCBWI! That's part of the full-circle, but there's more.

Two years ago Jim and I went to the Western Washington conference for the first time. It was at the moment in time that Blackbringer had sold to Putnam and I had just delivered the full manuscript to my editor Tim and was awaiting his response. To fill those nervous, fidgety days, I was working on some short stories (which happened to come from Sunday Scribblings prompts.) Well, we went up to Washington for the conference a day early so Jim could go to the friday "illustrator's intensive," and all day I sat in the Starbucks at the Bellevue Barnes & Noble and brainstormed how to take this very short story I had written -- Hatchling -- and flesh it out into a longer, more sophisticated story. I thought and scribbled notes all day. From the Starbucks I went to a sunny park and sat at a picnic table beside a lake where a heron was building a nest, and I came up with the BIG IDEA for Hatchling.

This past friday, two years after that, Jim and I sat at a brewpub next door to that exact Barnes & Noble, on the eve of that same conference, having lunch with Arthur Levine, who took a stack of edited manuscript out of his bag and handed it over the table to me. In that stack was Hatchling.

It kind of gives me chills. This book (which, by the way, is not going to end up being called Goblin Fruit after all; title announcement is forthcoming) started life at the SCBWI Western Washington conference in 2006, and it journeyed its way through the 06 Los Angeles conference, was sold to Arthur Levine in 07, and now, in 08, I got to sit with him and talk all about it and read the notes he'd written on my manuscript!

It's just so cool.

Here we are, by the way, and Jim of course:
Can you tell I feel totally blessed and amazed right now? I guess the moral of my story is: To get published, write good books. To write good books, go to SCBWI conferences! Go with a mind that is not bent exclusively on getting a contract. Go hoping to attend a workshop that will give you insight in how to make your book better, which will make it so much easier for you to get it published! Now, I do not mean to downplay the awesomeness and availability of the editors, agents, and art directors at these conferences. It is HUGE that they are there; it is important. It allows you to see the human face of publishing in a way that makes it seems like a real career filled with real people, rather than a mail drop box that eats your manuscripts ever now and then! AND, when your manuscript is ready, there they ARE. I'm just saying, there's more to it than that. Like Susan Patron said over the weekend, "A writer friend of mine said 'They'll only have one question for you, and that's: how do I get published?'" Just: have more questions than that!

And did I mention? Conferences are SO FUN.

Some writers reward you with candy for coming to their workshop.
There might even be cupcakes around.
And if not cupcakes, there's a strong likelihood of brownies, chocolate-covered strawberries, wine, cheese, and even rice krispie treats! Come for the snax!

Come to hear amazing, inspiring writers speak, like Newbery-award-winning Susan Patron (on right), and Newbery-Honor-winning Cynthia Lord.
And Newbery-Honor-winning Kirby Larson and talented illustrator, Sasquatch-costume-wearer, and [wo]man-on-the-street documentary film-maker Jaime Temairik:
(They kind of look like they're having fun, no?)

These two beautiful ladies are the Regional Advisors of the SCBWI, Sara Easterly and Jolie Stekly, who put the fabulous conference together and who everyone agreed were... amazingly well-organized!
They couldn't have done it without Laurie Thompson, left, shown here with Jim, me, and Kate Schafer, agent extraordinaire, aka Daphne Unfeasible, agent to the awesome Maureen Johnson, among others.

Here's Jim with, on the left, the super-talented Portland illustrator David Hohn, and in the middle, Laurent Linn, Art Director at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (he used to be creative director for Sesame Street and he got to tour Japan with Big Bird! Truly. He is also -- and it blew me away to learn this this weekend -- a reviewer for Bank Street College and was one of the ones who chose Blackbringer for their years-best children's books list! Thank you, Laurent!!)

Here are Jim and I with Sara and Jolie, Kate, and my fellow Putnam-author Royce Buckingham.
Below, agent Stephen Barbara, writer/illustrator Jim Averbeck, librarian and kidlit blog queen Betsy Bird (in her fab red dress) with Jaime, Kim, author Joni Sensel, and Sara.
And a few of Jim and I, in which you can just make out the new yellow racing stripes in my hair!**

And lastly, and most brilliant of all the people at the entire conference, are these ladies and gentleman (yes, I believe there was, in fact, only one gentleman)...
...who were smart enough to come to my workshop! Thank you!!

It was an amazing conference; I feel inspired, in love with the industry I am lucky enough to be part of, and ready to write more books. What more could you ask for?

**okay, the hair: my wonderful hair-stylist Maggie at Belle Epoque asked if she could put some fun colored extensions in my hair, and I said, "Okay!" We held up strands of all the 82 available colors, the blues and purples and stuff, and we decided on bright yellow. They barely took a half-hour to put in, and they last up to four months, though you can get them taken out at any time. They aren't the sew-in kind that makes girls cry on America's Next Top Model, and if you think you might want to try a splash of color, I say go for it! Call Maggie.

Chiapas Trip Part 2 - Around San Cristobal/ Chiapas Travel

As I mentioned in my last post, San Cristobal makes a great base from which to take day trips around the countryside. After our first day of wandering in the city, that's what we did. This involved going in vans with other travelers to see waterfalls, take boat trips, and visit Mayan villages. It's really the only way to feasibly see these areas without a car of your own (and there's still some sketchiness to driving in Chiapas; you hear of unofficial document-check sites that spring up on lonely roads, but are really bandits or Zapatistas or something. Anyway, we didn't try it.)

Our first day trip was to Sumidero Canyon, a dramatic stretch of the Rio Grijalva that goes through a narrow gorge. We took a fast lancha over the green water -- fast -- slowing down to gawk at sunning crocodiles and troupes of spider monkeys making their way through the treetops. It was gorgeously sunny and egrets were everywhere, sailing in twos just above the surface of the river, and the sky was just filled with circling black vultures. At one point, in a narrow part of the canyon, you looked up and up and the rock seemed to stretch so far up on both sides (the boat pilot said its highest point was one mile, but we didn't know whether to believe him) and the shapes of the circling birds seemed to recede into forever, until they were only specks so high overhead.
Funny thing about the crocodiles. In days after, when we'd meet others who'd done the same trip on different days, they all seemed to have seen the exact same number of crocs (2) under the exact same circumstances, giving rise to rumors that the guides have two trained crocodiles waiting at specified bends in the river. Ha!

The next day we took a much longer trip that was ostensibly about going to the Lagos de Montebello, down at the Guatemalan border. Well, we did end up making it to the lakes by evening, to find them relatively unspectacular, but along the way we had seen much more interesting sites: the waterfall of El Chiflon, the Tzeltal (Mayan) village of Amantenagro del Valle (known for its pottery), and some caves filled with very strange rock formations.

A potter named Maria:
The bird planters you see everywhere in Chiapas, made in Amantenango:
Interestingly, this day we ended up on a tour van not with foreign travelers, but with Mexican tourists. There were two brothers and a sister from Monterrey, in their 60s or 70s, and a mother and daughter from Mexico City, among others, and we had such a great time with them! We were the only non-Spanish speakers, and they helped translate for us. I should note here, we met NO other travelers from the US. For some reason, Americans don't go to Chiapas. There were Europeans and Israelis, primarily. Huh.If you're going to Chiapas, you can safely give the Lagos de Montebello a miss, unless you're planning on kayaking or something, but the pottery at Amantenango and the waterfall at El Chiflon more than made the day worth it. My only regret is that we only waded at El Chiflon, and didn't swim -- it would have been PERFECT swimming, sea-green water, perfect temperature, stretches of smooth rock in lazy bends of green water, with little chutes and eddies. . . But we only had an hour so we just waded, thinking we'd get our waterfall swimming fix at Agua Azul later on. Well, that was not going to be, alas, but we didn't know it yet!! (That story is for later.)
P.S. Those are only the "tiptoes" of the waterfall -- up above that there's the really high, dramatic part of the cascade, then it goes over a series of smaller drops, each with their own little plunge pools, one of which was just the perfect shady spot for wading.

Our third and final day trip was the most interesting, and took us to two Mayan villages near San Cristobal. San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan are both Tzotzil villages, but they couldn't be more different. Chamula. . . this was the strangest day of our entire trip. Really strange! First, there was a mild pall of fear cast over all us tourists because of the Chamulans' reputation for not tolerating photography -- you see, they believe they have 13 souls (12 human and one animal) and that when you take their picture, you steal one of their souls. Really! These girls let me take their picture (for 30 pesos), but I noticed that none of them looked at the camera. I wonder if that is their compromise, and they believe it protects their souls.
It's a fascinating experience, going to this village where they clearly have entered the modern era to some degree (there are satellite dishes and pretty nice cars, not to mention more Coca Cola than you've ever seen in your life), but they really truly stick to their old customs! They wear their traditional costumes, intricately embroidered blouses and furry black wool skirts for the women, and wool tunics and ribboned hats for the men, and they practice a very colorful blend of Catholicism and their old, mystic religion in the village church.
And here's the thing that had us all reeling: Coca Cola is part of their religion. Really! I want to know so much more, but here's the gist: there are no priests (ostensibly "Catholic," they actually worship John the Baptist above Christ), but five levels of shamans. For ills both physical and spiritual, you go to the church to consult a shaman. Once you tell him your problem he sends you off for supplies for your ritual. These involve white taper candles, eggs, Coca Cola (X number of bottles, depending on the severity of the problem), bottles of "posh" (sugar cane liquor, also used as medicine, even for babies and young children), and, in many case, a chicken or several to sacrifice in the church. We'd intentionally waited until Sunday/market day to go to Chamula, because that is when all of this is in full swing. The village zocalo and the church were crammed full, and walking into that church was like walking into another world. (Photography is absolutely forbidden, so sorry, no photos!)

There are Catholic saints in glass cases, but there any feel of Catholicism ends. The floor is strewn with fresh pine needles (the fragrance!) and covered with lit candles. It's dangerous to walk in there! Really. Every few paces is a shaman and client at work, and they'll have softened the ends of some fifty candles and stuck them right to the floor, and they pray as the candles burn down. Next to each client was their stock of Coca Cola, posh, eggs, and chickens in bags awaiting their fates. We avoided watching any actual neck-wrenching, personally.

The kicker is that the village leaders make big $$$ as the Coca Cola suppliers, and there it begins to make a kind of terrible capitolist sense. Shamans, apparently, will be shunned for refusing to use Coke in their rituals. It's a shunning society -- and worse. There's a charming little story in the town history I bought in the square that tells how in 1914 a Municipal President tried to change certain customs. Well, he was overthrown, and before they executed him, the townspeople made him dig his own grave. Oy. So, you can imagine that socially the Chamulans are really steeped in the old ways. The average age of marriage for the girls is a ripe old 13, and marriages are all arranged by the parents, with the girl having no right to refuse a suitor. Apparently the boys "shop" for wives on market Sundays! Our guide Fernando asked what traits we supposed the boys were looking for, and a smart-aleck Israeli named Charon quipped, "Brains?"

Ha. Not so! Fernando's answer was that of course they are looking for strong workers; specifically, they look at the one exposed body part -- the calves -- to see if a girl is strong or not!

Buying more weavings in the square:
Ooh, and I bought some embroidery yarn that they use in the weavings. Not all this! Just a selection. Don't know what I'm going to do with it, but some day I'll think of something:
Really, San Juan Chamula is another world, another time! But in Zinacantan, not 7 km away, though they are also Tzotzil people, things are really different. Because they have more communal wealth due to a greenhouse program that exports flowers all over Mexico, they have more education, and hence. . . change. Couples marry for love -- actually, they "escape" together and come back when the girl is pregnant, and are married in church by a priest!!

In Zinacantan we watched weavers at work, and we -- of course -- shopped, and we also got to see the inside of a traditional house and watch the women making tortillas over a wood fire. And then we got to eat fresh tortillas!
Note how all the Zinacantan women are wearing the same color scheme of purple and blue. Their clothing is so gorgeous!

Women weaving on a backstrap loom:

In the courtyard:

There's much more interesting stuff to tell, but this post is getting a little long, so I'll leave it at that.

Tomorrow we're off to the SCBWI conference in Seattle, where we will get to have lunch with Arthur Levine and talk about Goblin Fruit (yay!!), and have a "West Coast Kids Lit Drink Night" organized by the inimitable Betsy Bird. Can't wait! More after the weekend. Cheers!

Chiapas Trip Part 1 -- San Cristobal de las Casas/ Chiapas Travel

San Cristobal de las Casas is a Spanish colonial city in the highlands of Chiapas, and aside from being a marvel of color -- raspberry-colored houses, lime green and sky blue, marigold-colored cathedrals! -- it also has a perfect climate. About 75 degrees, blue sky, breeze, with bougainvillea and banana trees growing in all the courtyards, and geraniums and hibiscus sprouting from the Mayan-made bird planters that are everywhere in the city.
We’d never been to Mexico before, never experienced that melding of European architecture with Latin color and indigenous culture. Beneath the arcades of the Spanish churches, Mayan women sell traditional weavings and embroidery and mangoes and pineapples and chili peppers are piled up in pyramids. It’s a magical combination, to which you add amber and jade jewelry, great organically grown local coffee, all the color you can look at, fun shopping, no herd of tourists like you see in Cancun, and that perfect, perfect weather! San Cristobal is pretty awesome.

We spent our first day just strolling around the city -- well, shopping and eating around the city, you could say! Not an hour out of our hotel and we’d bought two tapestries at the craft market that surrounds the Convent of Santo Domingo! And Jim found a gorgeous leather bag just the right size for a weekend trip and unspeakably cheap:
Now, from home, I am yearning to teleport back and buy more of everything. The shopping was hypnotic; I think there is something about all that color that kind of drugs you -- we would say, “We’re just going to look,” but as soon as we engaged in any way with one of the vendors, we were lost. They are experts at reading your reactions -- I swear, they can sense the subtlest shift in interest when you lay eyes on a color that you like, and before you know if they’ve unfolded ten more exquisite pieces and laid them out for you! I defy you to come away empty-handed!
We hadn’t been out long before we had to go back to our hotel to unload our first round of purchases. Oy! And this was just our first day, and we hadn’t even found the mangoes yet! We had to pass back by our hotel a second time to drop off the mangoes -- ha ha!

The Mercado Municipal was like a shrine to mangoes -- tree-ripened mangoes, like you never ever ever ever find in the US! Now, you may know this about me, but mangoes are my favorite food (well, mangoes and chocolate share that honor, but chocolate is good everywhere, and mangoes are not) and I have joked about making a Mango World Tour. Well, this trip can now be refered to as “leg one” of that tour!
We bought five different kinds of mangoes that first day, from a lovely Mayan girl named Veronica who showed us how to eat the littlest of the lot, a lemon-sized green mango that you don’t slice, but only make a little slit in its skin and then drink it. Oh yum. It was so good! But we didn’t actually feast until later. There was the whole rest of the day for wandering. We went to the Museum of Amber and the Cafe Museo Cafe, where we learned about the amber and coffee industries here -- Chiapas is Mexico’s major coffee state, and it is one of the world’s leading deposits of fossilized pine tree sap! (Did you know amber is 40-million-year-old tree sap?) We ate interesting things: banana soup and walnut and tamarind popsicles among them, and when it was time to head back to our really lovely hotel where we had a patio all to ourselves for our mango feast, we stopped at a bakery for bread and dessert. This was fun: when you walk in, you pick up a silver tray the size of a trashcan lid, along with a big long pair of tongs, and then you walk around loading yourself up with macaroons and apricot tarts and cream cake. Not a bad way to dine! (It reminded me ever so slightly of Turkish Delight shopping in Turkey, especially the one lovely shop in Fethiye where you were encouraged to taste as you browsed. Swoon!)

And then, yes, we feasted! Five kinds of mangoes, sampled in descending size order, finishing up with the little green “mango pine” (that’s pronounced peen-yay; I don’t know how to make the accent mark) which was a miracle of juice, and tasted a little like coconut! Oh, but don't attempt it on a first date. It's really slurpy and dribbly!

So, that was our first wonderful day. San Cristobal was our base for most of the trip, so we got a pretty good feel for it (the historic center, anyway). San Cristobal is a perfect base for a week-long trip or so, because it is so charming, with good restaurants and cafes, and many fascinating places are within day-trip reach, such as the Canyon del Sumidero, the waterfall of El Chiflon, and a number of Mayan villages, not to mention Palenque. All that and more, in my next few posts!

Oh, but first, look at our beautiful hotel courtyard!
If you're going to San Cristobal, I highly recommend the Hotel Posada Jovel. We had our own little mango-eating terrace right in front of our room, with a view of the rooftops of the city and the mountains beyond. Delightful!

[The square pages above are from the Shutterfly photo album I am making of the trip -- I am currently obsessed with it! Can't drag myself away from the computer! For the backgrounds I'm using close-up pictures of the awesome stucco walls in San Cristobal with all their peeling paint and rich colors; we might have looked a little nutty taking all those pictures of walls, but I'm glad we did!]