Pray for Rain

2012-01-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

I love small town museums. Years ago on my first trip out West I noted in my diary some of the artifacts we saw -- different types of barbed wire! A dime once handled by Calamity Jane! A gramophone which belonged to Susan B. Anthony's niece! But I really became serious about small town museums in Roslyn, Washington, which was famous at the time for being the place where the tv show "Northern Exposure" was filmed. We went into the museum thinking to kill 15 minutes and we came out 2 hours later.

Nevada is dotted with small towns and many of them, like Roslyn, are mining towns. Mining towns are not your midwestern small town, settled by pioneers and immigrants looking for land. Mining towns flare up and die out. Some of them barely last a decade. They were inspired by greed, particularly out here in Nevada, where the land looks so unpromising for any kind of life. They were a deliberate effort by people to to pit themselves against nature, to take as much wealth as they could, no matter how, come what may. The effort failed, of course. Money was made, and spent, but it was spent elsewhere, and then the mines closed, and the towns were left behind, broken buildings on the sides of a mountain.

But while that effort at wealth went on, something else was happening, and that's what you see in museums like the one in Tonopah. High school graduation day, with everyone standing in front of the school. Sunday school picnics, the priests long figures in black. A open-air boxing match. High school bands, Elks, Odd Fellows, Women's leagues. Saturday night dances.

In towns like Tonopah, or Goldfield, or Austin, I try not to think, here is a place that failed. I try to think, here, civilization was planted.

2012-01-06T14:56:00.000-08:00

Early January always means upheaval in my life, and the name of that upheaval is basketball. Middle-school basketball: shoes squeaking on the floor, wild throws, the boys self-conscious in baggy shorts, the girls faster, taller, more aggressive. Late dinners, homework not done, and driving across town to some brand-new middle school in an unfinished neighborhood. UNLV games: sitting high in the upper balcony, watching the cheerleaders jump around, the lights dim, fireworks shoot up, the players run across a red carpet onto the floor and everyone shouts as if it isn't just another weeknight.

With me, basketball is definitely a childhood thing. It's long dark winter nights, listening to Kentucky game on the radio, drawn into an unmapped, virtual world of reputation, gossip ("good squad this year") and rival schools ("after that the 'Cats'll be up in South Bend to face Notre Dame"), learning about working off the clock and drawing a charge and that'll be two from the charity strike. (No one says "charity strike" -- a.k.a. free throw line -- anymore but it was a favorite of Cawood Ledford, the UK announcer.)

It's been said that baseball, because its not played on a clock, is a sport which stops time. Basketball is nothing but clock. It's a sport of the individual moment, the moment you're living in, the bobbing wave, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald's image, which always seems about to bring you forward, the moment when it seems everything can change.

Merry Christmas from the girls

2011-12-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

Years ago when I lived in New York I found two sets of ornaments in an art supply store around the corner from where I worked in Midtown. One was Dickens' characters. The other -- and why this is Christmas-associated I don't know and don't care -- was Golden Age Hollywood actresses.

Alice Faye, Bette Davis, Hedy Lamarr

This is Sonja He nie, who made ice-skating movies and was also a three-time Olympic champion. (If you ever watched M*A*S*H, you may remember that Colonel Potter was a fan of her films.)

And I've completely forgotten who this is. My best guess is Irene Dunne.

When we first moved to the house I hung the girls up on the staircase as Christmas decorations and somehow I never took them down. This year I finally moved them back to the tree, to join Mr. Micawber, Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, Little Nell and....Mrs. Gamp?

Merry Christmas to all! Have a happy and healthy set of holidays!

End of the year reading

2011-12-12T13:25:00.000-08:00

The end of the year is well-known as the time that all the big Oscar-type movies come out. There's kind of a similar effect in books, with blogs and publishing industry magazines talking up the big books and potential prize-winners. So here's my list. Probably not all prize winners but well worth seeking out and keeping in mind for that after-Christmas shopping.

Most recent read: The Returning. Published in Australia originally as Bloodflower (truthfully, I would probably never read a novel called Bloodflower, so this is one time the US title is an improvement.) The Returning is hard to characterize. It's set in a unnamed country whose culture is at times vaguely English, at other times vaguely feudal Japanese. A civil war has unsettled everything. The main character, Cam, returns to his village, but soon leaves again because of the resentment everyone bears him (he was the only one, of all the men who went, who returned.) The narrative follows Cam but also the other inhabitants of the village: an orphan boy, a refugee girl, Cam's sister, his former fiancee. It's at this point that I break off and say, just read the darn book. It's very well done, one of the most thoughtful and interesting books I've read on the YA side in a long time.

Potential Newbery(s): Bigger than a Bread Box. I don't read a lot of middle-grade or contemporary novels but I read this feeling I had fallen into the hands of a master. The plot works, the problems are realistic, and best of all, not only is there magic, but there are consequences to the magic. The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making. This is one of those books that winks at adults, and might even be aimed at them for all I know. (I did wonder, while I read it, how many children would really get into it, but then I remembered that at age 10 I read all the Oz books I could find, and they do much the same thing.)

Obligatory Mentions: Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Chime.

Overlooked: Fly Trap. Frances Hardinge in the only writer I can think of fit to inherit Diana Wynne-Jone's mantle. She just comes up with stuff that makes other YA fantasy seem pallid.

And one other mention, since I'm only 3/4 of the way through: Life: An Exploded Diagram. Love and the Cuban Missile Crisis and do I get the feeling that Mal Peet still doesn't quite know what kind of a writer he is? Yes, but worth reading.

Publication!

2011-12-02T13:02:00.001-08:00

Awhile back Laurel Garver at Laurel's Leaves posted this piece on boosting writing credits by publishing in literary magazines. Specifically, she suggested using scenes or chapters which you have cut from an MS but which can stand alone as stories or flash fiction.

After I read this, I turned over, mentally, what I had that might fit her suggestion...fragments from an abandoned project that are still rather fragment-y...two short stories I wasn't sure what to do with. Then I remembered a prologue I had written for my current WIP. It takes place about 20 years before the main action and I wrote it out partly to give one of my characters a backstory. I liked it, but I wasn't sure how it fit in with the main narrative and finally one day I took a Joan Crawford-style vow of "No more prologues, ever!" and cut it entirely. It worked as a stand-alone story, however, and thanks to Laurel's piece I polished it, sent it out and and this week, as short story now called "The Feeb," I got an acceptance for it from The Waterhouse Review, an online literary magazine in Scotland.

(And they pay! OK - a token payment of 2 pounds -- but still!)

I'm really excited. It's kind of a smashing little story and I was always very proud of it but it's nice to know that other people see the same thing in it. And not for nothing is The Waterhouse Review known as a "personable" market. They've been great to deal with, honest and cheerful and so quick to respond!

I think I'm still a little in the is-it-all-a-dream phase...

I'll post a link when the story comes out in January. Big thanks again to Laurel for the idea. I had dipped my toe in the magazine market years ago when everything was print and response times were looooong and I never would have been motivated to do it again were it not for her post.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am cooking. No, I'm not shopping.

Heretical Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

2011-11-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

Last week I saw this post on NaNoWriMo by Rebecca Ryals Russell who blogs at YA Authors You Never Heard Of. She addresses the fact that some writers just aren't interested in NaNoWriMo, and I read it because I've always included myself among them. I write every day, I have long-term plans for what I'm going to do and don't need outside stimulus, and word counts? Not only do I not do them, there are times when I actually want the word count to go down, not up. Most of the first two weeks of November looked like this: read six-sentence paragraph. Rewrite. Now an eight-sentence paragraph...(hold music plays, 45 minutes pass)...now a four sentence paragraph. Move to next paragraph...(more hold music)... At end of day, think how I have ruined the story. Next morning, read it over and decide it's not so bad.

I saw something similar at my critique group on Saturday. Someone suggested doing writing prompts or flash-fiction contests as part of the group. Several people perked up immediately, "I'll do that! Sounds like fun!" Two other people, as well as me, didn't want to. "I've done that, and it takes time away from what I'm supposed to be working on."

I think it comes down to the basic question, why do you write? Because it's fun? Because you like to tell stories? Yes, and yes, and yet...writing is Work. It's hard. It's sitting down every day to face the dragon of failure and fearing the day you won't be able to fight him to a draw anymore, because on that day life will hardly be worth living. And honestly, for all the community that exists in the writing world, you face that dragon alone. You have to, because your dragon is not like anyone else's. (OK, official end of dragon metaphor!)

What I'd like to know is not, does NaNoWriMo help you get started or help you write more easily, but, does it help you get serious about your writing? Does it help you improve? Does what you start turn into something finished?

Stitch by stitch

2011-10-24T15:18:00.001-07:00

Last December I decided I wanted to learn to knit. It was during the dead days at the end of the year, and I was feeling flush with Christmas money and gift cards. I bought a book on knitting, and a lot of supplies and I watched a lot of online videos demonstrating various knitting stitches. (It is impossible, by the way, to knit and move the mouse to hit the pause/start button as needed, so those videos are not very useful.)

Now, don't throw things at me, but what I'm working for here is this...knitting is a lot like writing.

1. You're going to screw up a lot before you get it right.
Most of my early scarves had this weird tendency to get wider. I'd cast on 18 stitches and a certain point find myself with 26. When this happens, what do you do? You do what you do in writing. You revise it. You go back to where you went wrong and you pick the bad part out and you start again and try to keep the count right.

2. Follow the rules, even when you don't think you need to.
The knitting book said "some people count stitches," which lead me to think that it was kind of a nerdish thing for uptight people and hey, man, I don't need that kind of headache, man...
Now I count stitches. And my scarves don't get bigger. *crosses fingers.*

3. You keep going because you fall in love.
Early on I went to a small yarn store and saw such beautiful yarns that I spent more money than I'm willing to confess, even now. The first scarf made from one of those yarns, though a little...uneven...in shape, has drawn a bunch of compliments mainly for the color. As I drove home I thought, now you've got to make sure it comes out right. And every time I looked at the yarns I was led on to create something. I wanted to try new things, just so I could live up to the yarn.

4. Know your limits.
I joined a new church and someone asked me if I could knit and next thing I knew I was knitting a prayer shawl, in slightly scratchy green acrylic Wal-Mart yarn. (My own fault -- I picked out a shade that looked nice in the sunlight.) The prayer shawl fell victim to the same enlarging phenomenon that the scarves did. But it will be done...someday.
Here's what else I can't do. I can't purl. I can't do circular knitting. I can make scarves. Lots and lots of scarves.

Everyone needs scarves.

Count Marco

2011-10-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, research in the old newspaper archives! An alternate universe, in which Martin Luther King is still alive and Barry Goldwater might be elected president.

Actually, when I'm doing research I don't pay too much attention to really big historical events. I'm looking for the small stuff, the little things that make up ordinary life. Sleazy films at the drive-in ("Child Brides," "Slave Empress"). Fancy downtown stores like Ronzone's and Chic Hecht's vs. Penney's and Kresge's.

And Count Marco's column. I speed up the microfilm machine and try to avoid getting sucked in by Count Marco and somehow I can't.

Count Marco -- supposedly he was Italian -- ran an advice column in the San Francisco Chronicle which was widely syndicated in the 60s and early 70s. (His claim to modern day fame is involvement in the Zodiac killer case.) And basically, he makes Dear Abby seem like a hippie.

Count Marco's sole target is women. Women are lazy. They sit around all day buffing their nails and look like hell when their men come home. They give their husbands tv dinners instead of bothering to cook. They won't date a man unless he has a large pocketbook. They have no sense of responsibility and they teach their daughters to be just like them. Probably most interesting (poignant?) is a column that scolds women for continuing to date men who don't propose right away. "Remember, you can love any man," Count Marco says, "Be open-minded..." (I don't know why, but I hear a hint of wistfulness in that tone.)

At first it kind of startled me that stuff like this could run in newspapers all around the country. But then, if the Time magazine article above is to be believed, Count Marco was something of a joke even in 1959.

As far as research goes, Count Marco, like a lot of forgotten figures, is not very useful. I'd have to explain who he was if I introduced him by name and he's so obscure it just wouldn't be worth it. But as an example of the times he's invaluable.

The In-between Season

2011-10-06T13:08:00.000-07:00

So it's dark just about dinnertime now. When I clear the table light from the back door shines in the yard. Pajamas and hot tea have come back in style. The alarm goes off in the morning and I think: must be a mistake, it's too dark. Baseball is always on. I pull the slow cooker out from the back of the pots and pans.
I love in-between seasons. Winter and summer have their virtues but something about the mixed nature of this time of year, the light and the dark dancing with each other, the storms of the equinox, make it come alive for me.

Month of Holidays

2011-09-30T19:43:00.001-07:00

In five years of working at a Jewish-sponsored university, I've learned that two things are taken very, very seriously: kosher food laws, and holidays/Sabbaths. April and September-October bring days off -- some years, like this year, a lot of them.

I tend to spend these bonus days doing research. During Passover I shut myself up at the UNLV library, listening to oral histories (on a tape recorder!) and going through archives of the Sun and the Review Journal. Neither newspaper is indexed, so I had to read them page by page, which was extremely distracting (pause to see how different "Rex Morgan, MD" was in 1964 (not very)...pause to read prices of stereos and Danish Modern furniture...pause to consider a picture of LBJ and Khrushchev in fake Beatles wigs.) I think I got through about 2 weeks of February 1964, all told.

I started this set of holidays by going to the Museum of Atomic Testing. Atomic testing is emerging, maybe, as a motif in the book. It opens with one of my protagonists remembering watching atomic tests from the playground of her elementary school, and the other protagonist has a father who works at the Test Site. It's an interesting museum, combining serious information with some atomic kitsch. (The old "Duck and Cover" movie is played.) I noticed that the sections devoted to the later underground tests attracted much less attention from the visitors. I tried to look at everything, though I didn't find much information on workers at the site. (There's also a reading room and a public archive, which I might go back to later if I have more specific questions.)

There's a fine line with research. Too much can drag you down, quell the imagination. But finding that odd gem of a detail gives the book authenticity. When I come away from the research library, heavy-headed and a little sleepy, I'm usually aware that somewhere in my notebook is something that will lead me in a direction I never thought of.

2011-09-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

I was watching Mr. Rogers.

In the past couple of days the where-were-you-when-it-happened stories have swept over me. I didn't want to join in. I find it painful to talk about 9/11, and it's sometimes strange to me that no one else finds it so painful they won't talk about it. Perhaps I'm still at that stage of grief when you just try to go on, day to day.

So I'll say it. I had a three-year-old at the time and as soon as I got up I put Mr. Rogers on. I never watched the news in the morning then. Now, I watch the news every morning, ever since, and I've learned to recognize that tone in the announcer's voice that means, something very, very bad has happened. Then the phone rang.

We'd left New York six months before. My husband was born and raised there and it was my adopted city, where I went to college, lived and worked. In all that, I never went to the World Trade Center. I never had to. Didn't have business there and wasn't a tourist interested in the view.

But the World Trade Center was the modern city. There's a video -- a very primitive, early video -- for the Blondie song "Heart of Glass," which basically shows the band, playing on Saturday Night Live, intercut with shots of the World Trade Center and the Manhattan skyline. The Trade Center was the city, for those who came to it in the bad years and lived through them. It wasn't the past, like the Empire State Building. It was our city, the one we had trekked to.

My one thought, out in Las Vegas, was I should have been there. I should have gone through it with my city. I wasn't glad I had escaped -- I felt guilty.

The towers have never meant to me what they seem to mean for other people. I don't think of "first responders." (A horrible coinage.) Or freedom, that being a word that is so twisted around sometimes I don't recognize it. I take nothing away from the people for whom it does mean those things. We all have our own experiences of grief and our own methods of dealing with it.

This Sunday the streets of my town will be filled with people running a triathalon in honor of September 11. Running/biking/swimming is great, especially when do it for your own health. But part of me wonders how running a triathalon does anything for the dead. (Or the "fallen" -- another new coinage.)

After 9/11 my church orchestra got together, learned, over several weeks, Faure's Requiem, and, on a certain Sunday, performed it for the congregation. I remember listening to it, hearing the words, "Lord, give them peace, give them peace." And I thought, it's not peace for them we want. It's peace for us.

The Question of Talent

2011-08-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

I read a bio of Edith Piaf recently. The book itself was only so-so, but it led to me going Youtube to watch some of Piaf's clips. Which led me to this, from a movie Piaf made in 1941 (in German-occupied Paris, actually):

The best part is the way the people in the nightclub just stare at her, absolutely mesmerized.
If you ever look at the Youtube comments for Piaf, people say over and over, the voice, the voice, the voice...

Which leads me to think about talent. A couple months ago we had a speaker at work who mentioned a recent book called Talent is Overrated. The idea behind the book is that there's no such thing, really, as exceptional talent or genius. What distinguishes the person who succeeds in a given field is what the author calls "deliberate practice." This is hard work plus feedback, and the resulting modification of good/bad habits, etc. (And a lot of other stuff...I guess you have to read the book, which I didn't, just heard a precis from the speaker.) Over time, according to the author, this is what produces success.

Well, I'm a professional skeptic, particularly of speakers and self-help books, but the idea does make sense. Hard work is a given. Feedback is crucial, particularly for a writer. Belief is crucial.

But then I think about a voice like Edith Piaf's... And she just had that voice. She didn't have to develop it. (And where did it come from? Her mother was a minor nightclub singer, her father an acrobat. Her grandmother ran a flea circus.)

I suppose it's one of the nature/nuture debates that will never be resolved. In the meantime I'm going to go download "L'Accordianiste."

None but the Brave Deserve the Fair

2011-08-24T10:38:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's been awhile since I posted. I can blame it (partly) on being on vacation -- first Sequoia National Park (we stayed in Visalia, which is hot and full of flies, though there were a lot of fruitstands as compensation) and then in San Diego (I - I don't understand it. It's 9 a.m. and the sky is still grey!) The medical school where I work starts its classes in August so I've been busy there. We've gotten new computer programs which are supposed to make everyone's lives easier and lead to a paperless world. Hmm. I suspect things will be hairy for awhile but ultimately the brave will prevail.

And through all this I've been writing, writing, writing. Sometimes it amazes me. One part of the brain is dissatisfied, sees only disaster ahead, has to meditate 20 minutes a day to stay calm. The other part is saying, sit down, sit down, I've got this great idea on how to re-write this scene.

Mockingbird Summer

2011-08-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

A couple of posts back I mentioned The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilpin. The reason this book resonated with me so much is that it's partly about what it's like to love books and yet raise a child who, in spite of all encouragement, not much of a reader. My son and I have shared a lot of books, many of them the traditional children's classics, but it's mainly been me reading to him. As much as he loves the books, he'd like to keep it that way. He shows no interest in stretching out and finding his own favorites. Much like his actual diet, his book diet is quite restricted. Hates fantasy. Can't stand the supernatural. When his Reading class last year assigned a book by Mary Downing Hahn (think Lois Duncan for a younger set), he informed me that he liked the book but he didn't believe the ending because "ghosts aren't real." (Something about the solemn way he said that gives me hope for the younger generation.)

Until this summer. For the past few weeks he's been reading, on his own, To Kill A Mockingbird.

It was our idea that he do some reading over the summer, but he picked the book, which he had read excerpts from in his Kumon packets. He raced through the first part of it, swept in by the small-town characters and curiousity over Boo Radley. The second part of the book, about the trial, went a little more slowly. Over and over again I sat down and tried to answer questions -- about black men and white women and lynch law and the way the various characters accomodate the racism around them. Should I see it as a hopeful sign that I had to explain all this as past history? It strikes me that Harper Lee never questioned that this particular context of the novel would be understood. And in spite of all these explanations my son, like Jem, was confident that Tom Robinson would be acquitted. I bit my lip and did my best not to utter any spoilers, but I did hint, "you know, the novel's not really about Tom...it's about Scout and Jem." The next day there was a cry of outrage from his room. He was dancing around in rage, swearing he wasn't going to read any more of the book. When we got him calmed down, he said "But they can appeal to the Supreme Court, right? I think they should appeal to the Supreme Court!"

I don't remember the first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, though I think I was a teenager. The thing was, I read so much, and so quickly, that it was just another book to me -- a worthy book, but not a real favorite. Going through this experience with my son has given me a different perspective on reading. Instead of being an indiscriminate reader of good, bad and ugly, he reads a little, slowly, but he likes what he reads. And by reading it slowly he lives the book in a way I rarely do. It's given me an appreciation, too, of what works in Mockingbird (and what doesn't -- there are certain parts that make me squirm) and why.

Faces

2011-07-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

Prosopagnosia is the inability to remember or distinguish faces. Oliver Sacks recently wrote an article in the New Yorker about how he suffers from this: he failed to recognize a doctor he'd been seeing for many years and he mixed his own two brothers up! Well, nothing like that has ever happened to me, but I do have a terrible memory for faces. At church, work (where I come in contact with 100+ students) and other social places faces just slide by me. I've perfected the art of standing there, smiling, talking to someone who clearly knows me while I wonder who is this person? where did I meet them?

Even worse, I sometimes make up names for people ("she looks like a Gloria") and then I remember the fake name instead of the real one. I'm not sure if this is a side effect of prosopagnosia or just the writer in me taking over.

Think about writing from the point of view of a character with this problem. It's interesting what a barrier it is to basic everyday life.

What I find even more interesting is the people I do remember. You'd think a disability like this would be equal across the board, but it's not. Certain people always stand out, which makes me think that facial recognition is a fairly complex process in the brain. You might call this love at first sight, even though often it's not love, exactly, more like a certain heightened interest. It's the total opposite of prosopagnosia and also a fascinating thing to write about...

Old Movies

2011-07-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

I read an obituary today in the NY Times for one of my NYU film school professors, Robert Sklar.

The course I took from him was called, I think, Hollywood and Its Alternatives. The idea was we saw Hollywood films side by side with some classics of foreign cinema. I remember Anna Magnani running after the truck after the Nazis have taken away her lover in Rome, Open City. And Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped -- an almost entirely dark movie, filmed in a prison, and yet it made you hold your breath with suspense. On the Hollywood side I remember The Asphalt Jungle and The Big Heat, where Gloria Grahame has hot coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin. (I remember The Public Enemy, too -- Professor Sklar really had a thing for gangster films.) Above all I remember how stirred the class was by these films as we discussed them. They might be 50 years old but they were brand new to us. Each film was like a continent, rediscovered after being long-lost, and all our own. And there were those films that were hardly ever shown -- cult movies and potential cult movies -- over which we asserted bragging rights, like birdwatchers listing rare species.

Today you can get Rome, Open City on Netflix or watch the coffee scene from The Big Heat on Youtube. I think that's great, honestly. I count the hours I spent sitting in the Kentucky Theatre watching Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock as part of my education. But it was a hard-won education, full of gaps, and anything that makes great movies more easily available is a win for our civilization. But kids today will never know the thrill of making an effort to see a classic movie -- earning it, in a way -- and they will also never see the movies as I saw them -- on an enormous silver screen in black and white that could be satiny smooth or gritty as reality itself.

In tribute, here is Anna's famous run, yes, from Youtube. (I can't seem to get it to embed, so I'm just going to link it.) It's in Italian, but you won't need subtitles.

Rain

2011-07-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

We had a beautiful rain on Sunday. The day was smudgy and hazy, with the white sky we sometimes get when there are nearby wildfires. (There weren't any - none closer than New Mexico.) At 5 o'clock, when I drove out to pick up a pizza for dinner, the cars had their headlights on. After dinner the lamp made a pool of yellow light and we sat reading by it. For half an hour or more we heard long rolls of thunder. The air remained humid, the breeze began to stir, we took the garbage back in. I went outside once or twice and could smell the rain up in the clouds. Finally I looked up from A School for Scandal to see the first big drops falling on the porch. Then it rained and rained and rained. We paid for it the next day, the 4th, when it was humid and sticky, but it was fun while it lasted.

If you ever want to know exactly how dry it is in Las Vegas, I can tell you. When it rains here, they put it on the news. And the news goes crazy. Flooding! Don't go in the washes! Don't drive through running water! Stay indoors because lightning can get you 10 miles away! Look, a palm tree got blown over! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

I didn't listen to the news. My son and I went out on the porch (some people have sun porches -- we have a rain porch) and watched the drops dance in the street.

I am still on my Free Stuff on Kindle binge. I have overdosed on Victorian fiction, which means I am taking every act and thought very seriously and worthy of a thousand other acts and thoughts. By the way, A School for Scandal would make an excellent YA novel. So would William Makepeace Thackery's fairy-tale The Rose and the Ring. I can't believe no one's ripped it off yet.

The Longest Day of the Year

2011-06-21T12:17:00.001-07:00

red yucca Spring 08, a photo by gil thorp princess on Flickr.

"Don't you always look for the longest day of the year, and then miss it?" Daisy Buchanan asks in The Great Gatsby.
Daisy never had CNN to remind her.
The garden was gorgeous this morning and we have hummingbirds the way some people have mice.

3rd Person vs. 1st Person

2011-06-13T14:19:00.001-07:00

With 3rd person, you're the movie director. You're a master of sleight-of-hand, showing the reader this scene, withholding that bit of information, moving from person to person, building tension, jumping across continents, moving through space and time. You are the Author. You can do anything you like.

1st person, on the other hand -- and I know 9/10ths of YA is written in 1st person -- is messy. You're in the middle of everything, plopped down in your character's mind, wading through the long grass of distraction. You don't know the half of what's going on. Forget the well-tempered sentence: you drown in a sea of "anyway," "sort of," "kind of," and "I mean." You're not sure when to stop and so you keep going on and on, until you're sick of your character and just want out of his/her head.

OK, maybe you can tell I'm just a little bit prejudiced in favor of 3rd person. Frankly, I think that 1st person is (sometimes) a writer's crutch. It lets you do more with less. But before anyone who loves 1st person gets upset, let me just say that I'm willing to look at both sides of the subject:

3rd person is cold. It's remote. You're up in the sky, looking down on the characters. Good luck getting close to them as they wander through their lives while Mr./Ms. Author , who seems to be on a serious ego trip, tells you all about the history of some other place or person.

1st person is focused. It's you, telling your story. It's you living your story. You're witty, intelligent, sarcastic and flirty all at once. Everyone loves you. You have VOICE.

My challenge this time around, since I'm writing first person from two different characters: make them sound different.

That feeling

2011-06-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

Forgive this post for self-indulgence. Yesterday, in the middle of the hot-water-heater crisis, I had a semi-mystical experience while watching an earwig. Actually, I don't think the earwig had much to do with it; it was just there on the floor of the garage while I stared, thinking deep thoughts, and somehow got mixed up with them. Although if things work out maybe I'll mention him in the acknowledgements.

The deep thoughts were about my WIP and what came out is that story is going to be in first person instead of third, and told in alternating chapters by two characters. I got "that feeling." You know: the road is open, I can see this, I know exactly how this is going to work. And I could hear Janette's voice for the first time, though I created her as a character months ago.

The book is set in Las Vegas in 1964 and Janette, one of the narrators, is a 16 year old art student:

"John would have been an artist, if it wasn’t that he became a Beatle first. In pictures he always looks slightly apart, slightly more serious – not sad, like Ringo – but as if he sees through the press and the cameras and the screaming girls, as if he keeps something in reserve, apart from them. As if he’s waiting for something, almost.

I zipped up my art bag and slung it around my shoulder and then I remembered I’d bought a new tube of cadmium orange and it was…somewhere in my room. I finally found it in my school jacket. It’s a bad habit, leaving paint everywhere. One day last fall I threw my jacket on the floor and later I walked across it and there was a paint tube in my pocket and it burst open. I didn’t even notice until the next day when I put my hand in the pocket at school. Mom wasn’t happy, about the jacket or the carpet.

I threw the cadmium orange in the bag and zipped it up again. Then I opened the window, pushed the screen out, and slipped out it feet first, landing among the weeds and the bleached, warped boards my father still intends to build a shed with. It’s juvenile, I know, but it avoids Janette can you go to Safeway for me, oh, and take your little sister too. If Mom had her way I’d spend my entire Sunday pushing Betsy on the swings at the park.

Rachel’s mother is not like anyone else I ever met, never mind anyone else’s mother. She’s a good model, generally; she sits still without complaining and questioning me. She’s never asked to see the picture, either, which is good because the picture is pretty much a disaster.

But her house is so…not dark, exactly, but dim. And silent. There are never any women sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and goading each other into eating the last piece of cake. And there are too many things in the house. The first time I saw the living room I recognized, somehow, that every statue and picture had a particular reason for being there, that Mrs. Rosenkrantz wasn’t just hoarding stuff like a madwoman. But there’s just so much of it. It’s like a house under occupation by an army. I can hardly stand to sit there, scraping Mrs. Rosenkrantz’s head off the canvas for the hundredth time or re-working those damn glasses (I don’t know why I ever thought to put them in, and yet every time I paint them out the picture just seems nothing.) I feel like they’re all watching me – the stuffed trout, John F. Kennedy, St. Bernadette – and they know I’m going to fail."

This is just the middle of a passage so I'm sure a lot of it will go away or change. But one of the great things about writing for me is that feeling that something's there, something I can use and make something of. I feel like a cat, watching the mouse play and thinking, you're mine, baby.

Kindle, take me away

2011-06-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

One of the secret pleasures of Kindle for me is that you can get for free almost any book published in English before 1923. Since the copyright has expired, these books are in the public domain. Yesterday I woke up early and instead of thinking about 1) work, 2) various medical crises in my extended family or 3) our broken hot water heater and the mildew smell downstairs from the resulting flood, I thought, my God, think of all those old books you've always wanted and never could get...now's your chance, girl...be glad you've lived long enough to see this day...19th century literature FOR FREE!

A long-supressed wishlist tumbled out. Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantasy writer (he actually died in 1957, but his early weird stuff is available.) The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett. Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a WWI-era novel by H.G. Wells. The Golden Age, Kenneth Grahame's other children's book. A couple of Victorian classics: Three Men in a Boat and Diary of a Nobody. Oh, and I threw Moby Dick in as well. I've read it, but I figured it was worth a second look.

Two New Books

2011-05-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

I don't do book reviews a lot, but I've just finished two books that definitely go on the changed-my-life list.

The first is Among Others, by Jo Walton. Walton is mainly known as a adult writer of fantasy/alternate history, but I think Among Others could be considered crossover/YA. It has a little bit of magic in it, but mostly its about being a reader, about loving books, consuming books, talking with people about books, and not being able to understand people who don't like books. It's a very close portrait of growing up in Wales/England in the late 1970s, dealing with family, school, boy-girl stuff...and the whole time living another life through reading, and recognizing that this second life is the one you really want to lead when you grow up. If you were one of those teenagers that just read and read and read, this book is about you, and you need to read it.

The second book is called The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman. As soon as I saw the title on the New Book shelf in the library, I thought, "I know what that book is about. It's about my son." And it is.

Gilman, who comes from a literary family and was at that time teaching at Yale, wanted a child who would love books and poetry, someone for whom she could re-create the cosy world of her own childhood. But she had the sense that her son Benjamin, in spite of his precocious reading, was somehow "off." In fact, he turned out to have a host of disabilities (hyperlexia, sensory integration) related to autism. Gilman subtitles the book "A Story of Unexpected Joy" and in fact there is great joy, both in the progress Benjamin makes and the things Gilman learns from her son. As I read this book I found myself putting it down from time to time and pacing around, remembering things from my son's childhood. The motor difficulties ("Don't worry -- not all children crawl.") The blank staring at other children ("He's just shy.") The day what you thought was your child's personality is just a list of symptoms on a website.

Even if you don't have a child with a developmental disorder, you're bound to be touched by The Anti-Romantic Child and to see such children in a new light (I did, and I thought I knew everything I was supposed to about the way my son's mind works.) It also struck me, as I was reading it, that Gilman's book is kind of the story of a generation. Women my age grew up with three factors affecting child-rearing: 1) less experience with babies because of smaller families, 2) less availability of parents and grandparents, and therefore dependence on books for child-rearing 3) a kind of "free to be you and me" attitude that encouraged us to see children as individuals in which there was no such thing as "wrong" development or behavior. We are also the generation that seems, based on statistical evidence, to face the highest rate of autism in our children. I don't know why this is and I don't really want to go into those muddy waters. But I appreciate Gilman for writing the story of what she and I and a lot of other mothers have gone through.

Mother's Day Thoughts

2011-05-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

"I can't remember it all!"
"Don't worry, you'll remember it. You practiced."

"I can't sleep."
"Just close your eyes."
"I still can't sleep. I'll never sleep."
"You'll go to sleep. Everybody goes to sleep eventually."

The whole time you are thinking to yourself: What do I know? When did I get to be such a confident person? So much of motherhood is just making stuff up.

It's interesting that mother-child and specifically mother-daughter relationships are so often portrayed negatively in YA fiction. The "typical" YA mother is absent or indifferent, and others are downright evil. Bad or absent mothers make for a good story, of course, and there's some psychological truth to the motif, since most teens want nothing to do with their parents. But for this post I thought I'd search my library for a good mother-daughter relationship and this led me to Lois Duncan's 1977 classic Summer of Fear.

I won't recap the plot, but Summer of Fear involves Rachel and her Ozark cousin Julia. Cousin Julia -- who is not cousin Julia at all, but a witch -- intends to usurp Rachel's place in the family and to that end kills Rachel's dog and a family friend. Her last intended victim is Rachel's mother, who is supposed to drive off the road at a certain spot in the mountains between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. But Rachel's mother isn't at that spot, at the time, because she's made an detour to buy Rachel a new dog:

"This has been such a difficult summer for you, honey," Mother said. "I thought it might help to have your own dog again. Not that he will ever replace Trickle -- you don't replace a person -- but he can make his own place in your life. All of us in the family have been so worried about you. We hate to see you so unhappy."
And there in her eyes was the answer, the thing Sarah [Julia] had not reckoned on, had not been prepared to handle, had not known how to combat.
It was love.

So in honor of Rachel and her mother, and all mothers, and all children, Happy Mother's Day.

Easter Eggs

2011-04-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

I always get days off this time of year so I spent this afternoon doing Easter eggs with my son, who is officially too old for Easter eggs. I have no real point here, just the joy of doing something simple and colorful. Happy Easter!

Pig Will and Pig Won't

2011-04-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I was arguing with someone at work about going to a potluck lunch. I wanted to go. The other person -- from some personal motive I was unable to dig out -- didn't. Later, when I was wondering why I had to be so self-righteous about it, I thought, well, you're Pig Will and she's Pig Won't.

Pig Will, in case you don't remember your Richard Scarry, is kind, cheerful, polite, helpful to his mother and always keeps his room clean. Pig Won't is obstinate, sloppy and defiant. As a child it was clear to me that Richard Scarry had based Pig Won't on my younger brother. This left me with Pig Will, and I've been Pig Will pretty much ever since (except for the keeping your room clean part.)

I love the look on Pig Won't's face, by the way. He knows he's in trouble, but he's pretty sure his mother's going to get him out ot it.

Of course, as a writer, you want to make your characters more than simple good and bad. Even Pig Wills are conflicted and often they rebel. And Pig Won'ts -- well, like the mother in the picture, they often call upon the reader's sympathy.

Big Questions

2011-04-04T14:37:00.000-07:00

The other day, coming out of church, my 12-year-old son asked me "Why did Hitler hate Jews?" I said "What a question to ask me, coming out of church..." Don't get me wrong -- I love having long talks with my son on a variety of subjects and I love that he's interested in history. But at that moment I was not sure how I could ever answer that question. Where to begin -- with World War I leading to World War II? Hitler's twisted personal history? The legacy of anti-semitism in Western civilization? Sigh. He's twelve years old.

My son's question came because his Reading class is currently doing a book by Eleanor H. Ayers called Parallel Journeys. Parallel Journeys is based on two memoirs -- of a boy, Arthur, who joins Hitler Youth, and a Jewish girl, Helen, who is trapped in Holland. It seems like a good way to tell the history of the time period and I like the fact that it's non-fiction. The Holocaust is a major subject for children's/YA fiction today, of course. When I was growing up there were far fewer such books, but I was fascinated by the subject, and read every one I got my hands on. (I remember those books reinforcing my already strong feeling that most ordinary people are cowards.) One I remember very well was The Devil in Vienna by Doris Orgel, along with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr and -- a real classic of the era -- The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. (I'm not leaving out Anne Frank, but I read that when I was much older.)

It's worth noting that all of the above books, even those labeled fiction, had non-fiction roots. Doris Orgel and Judith Kerr based their books on their own childhood experiences as refugees. There are many classic novels of the Holocaust -- Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic foremost -- but I think that memoirs, or fictionalized memoirs, of the subject have something that novels just lack. And I supposed that something has something to do with the question my son asked me. Why did it all happen? How could it have happened?

And how, as writers, do we ever grapple with such a subject?

Everyone who has ever tried has begun, basically, with story of one person. A boy who wants to join the Hitler Youth. A Jewish girl with a Christian best friend in Vienna. A girl who starts her diary by writing about her birthday presents and her movie star picture collection.

Perhaps that's the only way, as humans, we can ever understand things.

Diana Wynne Jones 1934-2011

2011-03-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

A ghost can't remember which one of four sisters she is, or how she died. Time and space are woven into a landscape, and things and people get stuck in between. A star is also a celestial being before being turned into a dog. A girl discovers that her aunts and uncles are the Pleiades and various Greek Gods. A world just like ours, except that everyone takes for granted that witches ought to be burnt at the stake.

What I loved about Diana Wynne Jones' books was their sheer inventiveness. She had a way of looking at the world that no one else had, and way of imagining magic that owed nothing to anyone who came before her. Magic overlaid and intertwined with the real world in her novels, but they were also grounded in real emotional situations -- the feuding parents of The Lives of Christopher Chant and Aunt Maria, school rivalries in Witch Week. Above all she could take an abstract concept -- time, for instance, or mythology -- and make it a real-world object without ever seeming gimmicky or heavy-handed.

My favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel is The Time of the Ghost, which is also one of her earliest. It begins with a ghost who is unsure who she is or what happened to her. Observing her sisters and family, she begins to piece the story together, until about half-way through the book, when the narrative jumps forward in time and the reader realizes that nothing is what it appears to be. The sisters in the book, and their situation -- living in a boys' school, neglected by their parents -- were based on Jones' own childhood, which adds to the darkness of a book that is already concerned with death and witchcraft. Jones would go on, in her prime, to write books that were much more inventive than The Time of the Ghost. But I've rarely read a YA book with such emotional depth. If you've never read Diana Wynne Jones, go look for the The Time of the Ghost. Then read Dogsbody, and then the Chrestomanci books, starting with The Lives of Christopher Chant. And then you should still have a couple dozen more books to read. You'll enjoy every one of them.

Turtles All the Way Down

2011-03-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

The work I'm currently querying has a bit of a long intro. I've gotten mixed feedback on it. Some people think the writing is strong, others think it's too slow. My crit group suggested cutting it back, at least. I've almost resigned myself to cutting it and yet I sit here, feeling more like I hold a knife than a pair of scissors, unable to start. Normally I have no problem with revising. When I see sentences and paragraphs that don't work I'm eager to re-write them until I feel they're perfect. (Strange how those sentences always seem to grow back -- like crabgrass.) But in this case I'm revising something I think is good. Cutting into it doesn't feel right. All I can think of is the "turtles all the way down" story."

Don't know the "turtles all the way down" story? Here is is:

Bertrand Russell (or some other agnostic scientist, in other versions of the story) is giving a lecture on the universe. Afterwards an old lady comes up to him and says:
"Very interesting lecture, young man, but you're completely wrong. The universe sits on the back of a giant turtle."
Russell says: "All right, but what does the giant turtle sit on?"
Lady: "Another turtle."
Russell: "And what does that turtle sit on?"
Lady: "Another turtle."
Russell: "And what does that turtle sit on?"
Lady: "You're not listening, young man. I'm telling you, it's turtles all the way down!"

Revising this is like pushing one of those turtles out of line. And it's a long, long fall to the bottom of the universe.

Yes, I know this is the "kill your darlings" rule. Any advice on "giving-your-darling-a-haircut-but-not-chopping-off-its-head?"

News from 1964

2011-03-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

My current WIP is set in Las Vegas in 1964. The upside of this is that I can walk Rachel's neighborhood and decide which house she might have lived in. The downside is that other opportunities for research are very limited. Las Vegas is a city that doesn't consider its own history very important.

Oh, sure, we have a lot of lore: Busgy Siegel...Benny Binion...Howard Hughes. But uncovering ordinary life in Las Vegas is hard. For instance, the microfilms of Las Vegas' two newspapers are kept at UNLV. But they're not indexed. Actually, they are partly indexed, but those partial indexes are kept in a different location, across town. So when I do get down to UNLV to do look at those microfilms, I'm just going to have to fish around.

Until I can get to UNLV, however, I've been relying on the Henderson Home News. Henderson, the suburb where I now live, was in those days a small industrial town way some ways out in the desert from Las Vegas. The Henderson library has digitized every issue since 1950 and put it online. Keep in mind that Henderson was a small, small town in those days. The Home News came out two days a week and ran about 4-6 pages, plus advertising. Sample front page articles: someone found a lost dog out in the desert. Two rattlesnakes are killed on Texas Street. A square dance is held to raise money for a local family with a sick child.

But as I read a little more, I began to see the Henderson, for all its sleepiness, had some major stuff going on. Perhaps not surprisingly for a small town dominated by industry, there was some political corruption. The Home News ran a number of headlines critical of the mayor, a man named William Byrne. In January of 1964 they criticized him for keeping Henderson out of the state health district. By March, they were able to show that he had enriched himself in a local land deal. In April they began a recall drive. By August (I skipped ahead), there was a new "mayor pro tem," which suggests that Byrne resigned. In February an Esquire magazine writer named Thomas K. Wolfe accuses the Henderson hospital, St. Rose of Lima, of catering to Vegas call girls, an allegation loudly denounced by all. (Seems unlikely to me...the hospital was still run by nuns in those days.) In late January, Mrs. Maralyn Warmington goes on trial for shooting her husband, who had threatened to kill her if she left the house to go to a ceramics class. Mrs. Warmington is acquitted a week later, after the police mishandle the evidence in the case. (On purpose, I wonder?) In September of 1963 John F. Kennedy visits Henderson and makes a speech at the Convention Center. Two months later the newspaper comments on his death are shocked and heartfelt.

I also begin to see, a little bit, the town I know. One of the Home News reporters, Jim Gibson, was mayor when I moved here, and then ran for governor. His father, Fred Gibson, was one of Henderson's first residents, and every day I drive to work on a road named after him. Then there's this article from 1963, a few weeks before Kennedy's assassination: "Basic High Graduate Harry Reid Passes Bar Exam."
(For my non-American followers, Harry Reid is now the Majority Leader of the US Senate.)

Of course, I'm writing my WIP about Las Vegas, not Henderson. But I think a lot of the stuff in the Home News will still be useful. The paper ran a lot of advertising, which is great for getting a handle on prices of things. There are bits of local color: rockets trails from the Nevada Test Site seen in in the sky at sunset. High school basketball standings. A "teen-age rumble" which resulted in a locker search at the high school, which resulted in a bottle of gin being found in a girl's locker.

No word on what happened to the girl, or the gin.

Library Thing

2011-03-11T09:51:00.001-08:00

I have a new widget up for Library Thing. I joined Shelfari not long after I started blogging but I never used it much. I read a lot of books -- mainly from the library -- and the thought of entering all of them, never mind reviewing, was kind of exhausting, so mainly I just ignored it, or only updated it with books that were particularly important to me. I did kind of envy those cool "Random Books from my Library" widgets I saw on other people's blogs, however, and so I finally kicked myself into going to Library Thing and signing up.

Unlike Shelfari or Goodreads, Library Thing is more focused on books you own (though you can make a category for books you've read but don't own.) And a library -- the books you've collected over a lifetime -- gives a slightly different picture of who you are as a reader. I have books in my library that belonged to my parents. I have favorite authors from my high school days. I have cheap paperbacks from book swaps. I have textbooks, home-repair manuals, cookbooks, and a guide to the major festivals of Japan.

A library, like a diary, is only a partial reflection of who you are. A lot of my recent interests aren't represented because I don't buy as many books as I used to for lack of space. But I'm looking forward to using Library Thing more than I used Shelfari, and getting to know the community there.

The Power of the Story

2011-02-28T10:14:00.000-08:00

I took my son to see "The King's Speech" over the weekend. (How was I to know George VI was going to drop the F-bomb?) As I did so I remembered the first grown-up movie I went to. It was "Fiddler on the Roof." (On re-release, ahem.) I cried and cried at the end, and went back the next week with my friend Amy, and proceed to tell her, in loud whispers, what was going to happen through out the movie, until the woman in front of me turned around and told me to shut up. And thus I learned my first lesson of movie etiquette.

By high school I was going to the art movie theater downtown and sitting through a bewildering mix of old Hollywood and avant-garde Eastern European movies, with some New Wave and Bergman thrown in. Passage to India. The Seventh Seal. Some Like It Hot. 42nd Street. Closely Watched Trains. It was an education, particularly in narrative and the language of film.

When I first read about "The King's Speech," I thought, honestly, that it was a silly subject for a movie. I mean, how trivial could you get about the Royal Family? Stammering, really? Some speech no one even remembers? (Speaking as an American, anyway.) But as with any creative work, it's not the subject, it's the storytelling. Make the viewer/reader care, as "The King's Speech" does, and you can follow it up with a sequel, "The King's Hangnail," I suspect.

A Presidential Story

2011-02-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

She was a rich man's daughter in a small Ohio town. When she was 19, Florence ran away with a boy her father didn't approve of. She came back home a little later, with a baby. She said the boy had married her, but small towns being what they are, not everyone believed her. Her father wouldn't take her back, so Florence supported the two of them by giving piano lessons. Then her father changed his mind -- only she'd have to give up the baby to be raised by them. She agreed. A few years later there was a new face in town, a newspaper owner named Harding. Now restored to her proper social position, Florence married him.

Harding liked everybody and everybody liked him. He also liked women. Of course, it was a shame for Florence, but men are men, and what are you going to do? You couldn't dislike old Harding, no one did. He was so popular it was thought by others he would make a good politician. He ran for Governor, but lost. He tried for Senate, and won. A story was invented about early widowhood, to explain Florence's past. Her son, well on his way to an early death from tb and alcoholism, was kept out of sight. And in a year when the American public would have elected anyone who wasn't associated with Woodrow Wilson, Harding became President of the United States.

Now Harding had lots of friends, and he gave jobs to most of them, and looked the other way when they took taxpayer money for their own profit. He had lots of women -- actresses in New York, his wife's best friend. Florence was always bossing him anyway and the newspaper reporters called her "the Duchess." She befriend socialite Evalyn McLean, heiress to a newspaper fortune, owner of the Hope Diamond, drug addict, and they consulted astrologers together. One of them predicted Florence's death, then said she would recover, but her husband was in danger. Plans were made for a Presidential trip across the United States, and even up to Alaska. In San Francisco, Harding, who'd shown signs of heart disease, died suddenly. His doctors, believing they'd be blamed, told the public it was a stroke. Rumor said that Florence had poisoned him. Scandal -- of all the corruption, thievery and adultery -- broke, and ruined Harding's hail-fellow-well-met good name.

Florence went home to Ohio, ill, and died a little over a year later.

Incidentally, Florence Harding was the first First Lady to fly in an airplane. Somewhere in there there must have been some good days.

Books I never forgot (though I forgot their titles)

2011-02-15T15:46:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking about the mystique of the books you read as a child. Not necessarily great, prize-winning classics, but books that somehow or other spoke to you, books you remember for sometimes very peculiar or trivial reasons. I've just been looking through the archives at Loganberry Books' Stump the Bookseller site, where you can post memories of books you read once whose titles you no longer recall. Technically you can post any book, but the majority of the posts are for children's books, and the posters say over and over things like "...I've been searching for this book for 30 years." And the things they remember about the book -- the cover, of course, an illustration, a particular plot twist, a word or phrase! It's a huge testament to how much books are loved and remembered, how they become part of people's lives.

I used Stump the Bookseller a couple years ago to find two historical novels which I read multiple times as a teen. I can credit both of them with developing my interest in certain historical subjects. For the first one, all I remembered is that the heroine was a girl in the World War I era who falls in love with a boy who is the town outcast because he has a German name. The boy's name, Paul, had stuck with me all these years, as did a scene where some townspeople threw stones at a dauchshund because it was a German dog.

This turned out to be Norma Johnston's A Nice Girl Like You, which was published in 1980, and was part of a series that Johnston wrote about the various members of a extended family in Westchester County, New York. But I'd actually conflated part of it with another book, Never Jam Today by Carole Bolton, about a girl who takes part in the women's suffrage movement. What I loved about A Nice Girl Like You was the Romeo-and-Juliet romance between Saranne and Paul, who was the classic "bad boy." And Never Jam Today gave me a picture of the World War I era as a time of change, with protest marches, an anti-war movement and new technologies. ("You can fly from New York to San Francisco in only four days," someone says to the heroine, who replies, "Why would I want to do that?")

The second book I remembered well was set in 19th century Russia and was about a girl who is sent to a boarding school for orphaned daughters of Army officers. She's unhappy at first, but eventually makes friends, and then the Neva river floods and the girls have to be rescued. Later she becomes a lady in waiting at the Tsar's court and is involved in the Decemberist Revolution. I remembered certain aspects with crystal clarity -- the girl's father was killed at something called the Battle of Borodino (they didn't teach the Napoleonic wars in Kentucky) and that she had friend called Sonia who was sent into exile with her Decemberist fiance.

I don't know how many times I read this book as a child, but I can honestly say that it possessed me. I identified entirely with the heroine. As an adult it was THE book I thought of when I remembered my childhood reading. (Like many of the posters on Stump the Bookseller, I remembered almost exactly what section of the library it was in.) However, I'd completely forgotten the title and probably never paid any attention to the author. Fortunately, when I posted the description someone had an answer right away: Masha, published in 1968 by a writer named Mara Kay. (There was actually a sequel -- I'd remembered it as being all one book -- called The Youngest Lady in Waiting, and that was the one about the Decemberist Revolution.)

Given that how big these books were for me as a teenager, I thought it might be fun to re-read them. I tracked down A Nice Girl Like You and Never Jam Today easily, and...well, I was kind of surprised and disappointed. The great romance of Saranne and Paul was mainly in my head: the book underplays it and they hardly even kiss. Never Jam Today turned out to be one of those historical novels where various facts are kind of shoveled awkwardly into the text. The dialogue was stilted and the characters' motivations were thin.

I can't believe I didn't notice these things as a teenager, and yet perhaps it didn't matter. I'd like to think great writing lasts and poor writing fades. But Stump the Bookseller is testament to the fact that sometimes readers love books in spite of themselves. Sometimes a book just sparks something in you, opening your eyes to a new world, in spite of problems with plot, structure and dialogue.

As for Masha, I can't tell you if it's a disappointment or not, as it is now a "rare" book and the cheapest copy I could find was more than $300! I guess it's better that way. At least I won't ever lose my memories of it.

Memories of Egypt

2011-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

If I haven't gotten much done this past week, blame Al Jazeera English, which I've been watching online for their coverage of events in Egypt. I wake up every morning hoping that Mubarak will be gone. I guess partly I'm a news junkie, and part of it is remembering the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, but I also have personal memories of Egypt from a trip I made years ago. I was only in my twenties at the time and had never really been out of the US much, and never been to a "third world" country. I'd like to say that it was a great experience which broadened my horizons and my understanding of the world, but that wouldn't be true. I was sick much of the time and I kept having panic attacks (I didn't know they were panic attacks until years later; at the time I just thought I was dying) and deep down I just wanted to go home. The one thing that epitomized the foreignness of Egypt for me was the fact that I couldn't get regular American-looking bread, even on sandwiches.

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.

But eventually I did rally, and I found myself collecting specific images. The crystal blueness of the Mediterranean Sea, unlike any water I'd ever seen. A donkey pulling a cart in the middle of insane Cairo traffic. Schoolboys with satchels yelling English at us and reaching up to touch my hair (platinum blonde at the time.) Unemployed men standing around the street, hoping to get tips for opening doors for people. The cemeteries at El Alamein. A rest house in the middle of the Sahara desert. The statue of some forgotten pharoah at Luxor, worn down to just a foot. (Talk about Ozymandias!) The call to prayer, at evening, dawn and noon, echoing up and down the streets.

We had come to Egypt at the invitation of Samir, a friend of my future husband's. On the way to Alexandria, speeding across the desert, he mentioned that anyone who had three speeding tickets in Egpyt faced a mandatory 20 year prison sentence. He added he already had one ticket on his record. I got the feeling that, having lived in the US, he knew things could be a lot better in Egypt but he accepted his government for what it was.

The Egyptian people no longer want to accept this, and I hope they succeed. They deserve better.

Clubs of note

2011-01-28T09:30:00.000-08:00

About two years ago I started a book club at my job. There are two other main members, both faculty members and PhDs -- a woman who grew up in Morocco and was educated in France and a man who immigrated from Russia after the fall of communism. Others drop in and out. We're very informal. Anyone can suggest a book, anyone can come to the meetings. The only rule we follow is that we do non-fiction one month, fiction the other. I can be a bit snobbish about the books I read, so one of the reasons I established the anyone-can-suggest rule is to get out of my comfort zone, and I haven't been disappointed. I wouldn't have read Eat, Pray, Love or Where Men Find Glory on my own, but I ended up enjoying both.
This month we're reading Hush, by Eishes Chayil, a YA novel which was nominated for the Morris award. It's a story about the consequences of silence about sexual abuse in a small community -- in this case, a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. When I lived in Brooklyn I lived in the very neighborhood in which the book is set and I recognized quite of bit of it, so perhaps that gave the book an extra interest for me. Who knows what the others in the group will think?
By the way, I've suggested a couple of YA novels to the group, and the one book they loved was The Hunger Games.
As I've mentioned already, last fall I found a SCWBI crit group in my area. We meet every other Saturday at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf near UNLV, and recently we've grown so much we hardly fit in the room anymore. I am really amazed by the talented people in the group and I just want to celebrate a bunch of recent successes. First, Nancy won honorable mention in a Tommy Di Paola-judged contest illustrating "Heidi." Second, Sharon won a Meegenius e-book contest and will have her picture book published on that platform. Third, Michael won honorable mention (26th out of 1000s of entries) in a contest sponsored by Writer's Digest. I so enjoy meeting and socializing -- and reading to -- these guys twice a month.

Short stories and graphic novels

2011-01-06T11:33:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote two short stories. Well, they were sort-of short stories. To be honest, I don't consider myself a natural short story writer and I don't even much like to read other people's short stories (Chekhov excepted.) The process of writing for me is getting to know a character in the long term, building them up, leading them into encounters with other characters, and you can't really do this in a short-story format. And these particular stories were surface pieces, once-upon-a-time story telling.

And then it occurred to me, as I tweaked various words and phrases for the hundredth time, that both these stories would work well as graphic novels. They were both visual and I could see how the pictures would tell the story more successfully than words.

My first question was, how do you write a graphic novel? I didn't intend to do the art, but I wanted to block out the size of pictures, relation to the text, and so on. So I went on one of the forums at Critique Circle as asked if there was a kind of software that graphic novelists used, something that would help with that. To my surprise, the replies I got were the graphic novels are usually written in a screenplay format, something like:

PANEL ONE

Mickey Mouse is seen with his hands up as Donald Duck points a water pistol at him. Minnie can be seen running away in the background, her flowered hat coming off.

Donald: Prepare to get wet, Mickey!

Mickey: But -- but --

Apparent the more description of the scene, pov, etc., the better. So for the past few days I've been tentatively re-writing these short stories in this format and having some fun with them. It's been a nice stretch for my brain. And I like to dream about what the finished art might look like. I've just finished reading Steve Westerfeld's steampunk novel Leviathan, and I just love the fact that it's YA and illustrated. Love the art, also, which reminds me one of my favorite books from childhood, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken.

Anyone out there up to any new projects for the new year?

New Year's Post (late)

2011-01-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

As far as I'm concerned, the grimmest day of any year is the Monday after New Year's. Once again you're up at an ungodly hour when it's not even light yet, eating cereal with your son, neither of you speaking, both of you thinking how quickly vacation ended.
So maybe you can tell I'm not much of a resolution maker. But in keeping with New Year's goal-making, I wanted to share something from a book on Jesuit spirituality which I read a few months ago and which has really helped me. This is from the chapter on "Making Decisions."

1. Beware of getting bogged down in what-ifs and if-onlys when you think about the future or try to make a decision. Deliberately causing yourself anxiety and fear won't help you make a better decision.

2. Never make a decision during a period of desolation. Your motivations will be unhealthy.

3. Ignore I-wants and be aware of your weak points.

4. Learn from the past -- wrong decisions you made before and what the consequences were.

I know that #2 really resonated with me. I've done that a lot -- just fallen into despair and said, "Since I can't...I'm just going to..."

And may all of your New Year's Resolutions come to pass!

Teens and dystopian fiction

2010-12-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

There's an discussion article today on the New York Times opinion page about "The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction." A variety of writers and "experts" weigh in with some fairly vapid remarks, but I thought Steve Westerfeld, author of the Leviathan series, hit the nail on the head with his comment on teenagers today:

"Teenagers are at a stage of life where they must tangle with almost adult responsibilities — school, work, college applications — and yet they haven’t been granted many adult powers or respect. They’re encouraged to work, but generally at menial jobs, and when they show up to spend their money, they’re carefully watched, assumed to be shoplifters and loiterers.

Schools are places where teens are subject to dress codes, have few free speech rights, and are constantly surveilled, where they rise and sit at the sound of a bell. Is it any wonder that dystopian novels speak to them?"

Merry Christmas to all

2010-12-22T11:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I did see Voyage of the Dawn Treader and I now know that Eustace is "You-Stace" and the actor playing him was one of the bright spots of the movie. Visually it was close to how I'd always imagined the book, too. As for the rest... hmm.

I did make an interesting observation about characterization watching the movie. The audience's attention focuses on Eustace almost as soon as the adventure portion of the movie begins, in spite of the fact that he's an unlikeable character. Long before he becomes a likeable one, we're identifying with him, even to the exclusion of Edmund and Lucy, who seem rather flat. (This is true in the book, too, but to a lesser extent, as Lewis is able to jump around more easily between the minds of the characters.) The transformation of an unlikeable character to a likeable one, and particularly getting the reader to identify with that character even before the transformation is a nice challenge for a writer.

I guess I'm a bit late for the Be Jolly blogfest so I'm not going to link to it but I'd like to post a picture of my tree. A long time ago I went a little stir-crazy one December and starting making ornaments -- first extremely intricate snowflakes and then posterboard animals. I didn't expect them to last, given the material, but we still put them up every year. For Christmas dinner my husband is going to make the only thing he knows how to make: seafood marinara. It's not really traditional but I don't eat meat anyway so it's been years since I had a Christmas turkey. And if you want a stretch a point, Italians (my husband's heritage) traditionally eat fish on Christmas Eve. (For my in-laws, this is preserved in an annual ritual known as "going to Red Lobster.") So on Christmas Eve day I'll bake cookies and probably take my kid Christmas shopping and we'll eat early and go to the children's Christmas Eve service and I'll try to catch the "The Bishop's Wife" -- one of the more obscure Hollywood Christmas movies -- on TCM.

And it wouldn't be Christmas without music, so I'll share my latest favorite: the Pipettes' version of "In the Bleak Midwinter."

C.S. Lewis hits the wall

2010-12-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

Sometime this weekend or over Christmas vacation I'll go with my son to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When I was a kid, Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book -- perhaps because of the map in front, or that I found Eustace (by the way, I knew no-one, and still know no-one, actually named Eustace and can't fathom how to pronounce it.* I guess I'll learn when I see the movie) a compelling character or just the theme of exploration, going beyond the horizon to the edge of the world. I'm crossing my fingers that some of this will still be in the movie.

The story behind the current movie productions of the Narnia books is this: Disney did The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It made money and got good reviews. I thought it was a pretty good movie and much better than some of the earlier Narnia adaptations. Then Disney did Prince Caspian. They spent a lot of money, and though the movie made money, it didn't make enough, and Disney washed their hands of the whole series and walked away. Prince Caspian struck me as an odd movie, and perhaps this is partly why Disney gave up. The one thing I thought when I left the theatre was, "Wow, that was very...macho." The movie was almost one long battle. Yet most of that stuff was also in the book and here's where the disconnect comes in. For C.S. Lewis, battles were something out of King Arthur. They were about chivalry and honor and Up England! Lewis actually fought in the trenches during World War I and probably knew war wasn't really like that, but when he came to write the books he either figured real war didn't belong in them, or he just fell back on the ideals of his Edwardian childhood. But movie battles usually aren't about chivalry and honor...movie battles tend to be violent. So the movie came off as a lot darker and tougher than the book.

Well, now Fox has taken over the series, and if Dawn Treader does well they will likely make the other books. I think Dawn Treader has the material in it to be a spectacular movie, if made right. About the other books, I'm not so sure. A Horse and His Boy has some politically incorrect aspects to it, though it offers a great female role. The Silver Chair mostly takes place underground and the plot is pretty convoluted and doesn't make a lot of sense until you realize it's Lewis' tribute to The Fairie Queen. The Magician's Nephew, on the other hand, could be a fantastic movie. Great settings -- the dead city of Charn, the Wood between the World, Paradise -- great characters -- bring back Tilda Swinton! A great part for someone like Alan Rickman as Uncle Andrew. Enormous guinea pigs! Unlike the previous two books, there's a strong plot and visual element to it.

As for The Last Battle, well, that's the only Narnia book I never really liked.

So I'm hoping Dawn Treader does well, and if it does, I hope the filmmakers make the logical leap to The Magician's Nephew.

What do you think? What remaining Narnia books are most "filmmable?" Who would you like to see in key roles?

I got a Kindle!

2010-11-29T11:16:00.000-08:00

For my birthday I got an unexpected present: a Kindle. Now, let me say that I'm the sort of person who is content with things the way they are, mostly: I check out books from the library, I loan and borrow them from people, occasionally I buy them. I didn't see that I'd use a Kindle much, especially as I use my credit card for large purchases only. However, as the idea began to work in my brain, I could see a couple of advantages to having an e-reader. Magazines, for instance. No more clutter on the coffee table. No more wondering why some weeks the New Yorker comes on Thursdays and other weeks on Mondays. No more missing New Yorkers! (Bah! It turns out I can't switch my current subscription to the Kindle, I have to wait for it to run out and renew it via Amazon.) And there's the space issue, which is one reason why I don't buy a lot of new books. As it happened, my book club had just chosen Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer -- a book about Pat Tillman. Not a book I would ordinarily buy...to make a long story short, oh so sinfully cheap on Kindle and I don't have to feel that I gambled buying a book I don't know much about. (Also, it turned out to be an excellent book which I don't regret buying.)
So I can see that this may, in fact, change some of my reading and buying habits. It will be interesting to see how much...
I still love books and I particularly love the cheapness and portability of them. I love that you can leave a book on a bus...or that you can find a book on a bus. When I was teaching I kept a library in my room and didn't try to keep track of who had what. Some of the books never came back, but I didn't mind -- I figured I was creating new readers. And I don't think Kindles will ever replace that.

I also want to say that I read an amazing book recently. It's written by a scientist called Iain Gilchrist and is called The Master and His Emissary. It's basically about differences in how the right brain and left brain view the world and how in the current era the left brain view (which is often fragmented and disassociated from reality and which views objects as having a fixed value) dominates. It's not exactly an easy read: there's a lot about Heidegger and the paradox of Theseus' Ship and other landmarks of the history of philosophy, as well as an entire section on brain structure. But definitely worth it. Among other things it kind of explains why it's so difficult, when you're revising something, to tell if it's any good or not. (Not that it helps you do anything about it, but at least you know why, after this book.)

...and stopped my mind from wandering

2010-11-17T16:20:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I read this article in the Science section of the New York Times about daydreaming. It says, basically, that people who let their thoughts wander aren't very happy. This is the kind of study I'm always a little suspicous of: for one thing, they apparently measured happiness by contacting people every 15 minutes or so and asking them to rate how happy they were at that moment. ("Are you happy now?" How 'bout now?") Then they compiled all the yeses and found people were most happy during physical activity, when they brains were basicially turned off. When they had to think and they let their minds wander, they reported themselves as unhappy.

Maybe they should have talked to more writers.

I do sort of understand where this study is coming from. Thoughts can become repetitive, they can chase you around and around and they make excellent attack dogs, hanging on and never letting go until they've convinced you to do something stupid.

But honestly, some of the best moments of my life have been spent daydreaming. When I get blocked writing, my general procedure is to lie down and let my mind wander while I argue the problem out to myself. I can't imagine life without it.

Some thoughts on Showing and Telling

2010-11-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go out on a limb here and admit that "show, don't tell" is one of those writing shibboleths that throws me a little. I'll even admit that I sometimes get the phrase mixed up and can't remember which one is the "bad" one. This may be because I understand "telling" to be as it is defined here -- vague language, lacking in detail and bolstered by cliche, language which doesn't add much to the story and which bores the reader. And yet lots of people seem to think that telling is any form of narration, or any kind of description without drama to it.
I'm hesitant to admit this, however, or even to ask other writers what they think, because so many people treat "show, don't tell" as the 11th commandment. So I'm going to go out a little further on the limb: I don't think it's a commandment at all. I think, like many rules, it gets a little complicated when you take a closer look.

Thought number 1. My son's English teacher recently gave him an assignment of writing "show" paragraphs on various emotions. In these paragraphs he couldn't say why he was angry (or happy, or excited) or what this emotion made him do. He couldn't use any "to be" words, either. She wanted sentences like "Furiously, I rifled through my papers looking for my missing homework." The paragraphs, as they ended up, were loaded with adverbs and over-dramatic language. And yet this was apparently what "showing" is -- at least in the teacher's conception of it. (Note that the article I linked above actually calls use of adverbs a form of telling.)

Thought number 2. People were writing good fiction for years before "show, don't tell," came along. Pick up Dickens or Austen and you get a fair amount of narration and digressive scene building. Try Jane Eyre -- lots of tell there (do we really care about Jane's cousins' religious beliefs?) Read a really bad 19th century novel and you'll get tons of tell. Standard practice in the 19th century was so express a character's thoughts/feelings via background description. The poverty and narrow outlook of a certain character, for instance, would be conveyed by a description of her room and style of clothing.
Then came the modernists, who rebelled against all that. Modernist writers wanted to capture everyday life by showing the interior world of their characters through emotions, memories and passing thoughts. The reader was not to be told anything. Classic modern texts like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway are nearly all showing -- the events unfold as they happen and the reader has to piece together who the characters are and the relationship(s) between them.*
To me, this puts a different light on "show, don't tell." It evolved at a particular time in a response to a particular kind of writing. Is there a basic truth embodied in it? Yes. Is it helpful to remember as you write? Absolutely. If by "telling" you mean vague descriptions and cliches, I'm all in favor of stamping them out.
But I don't think every single book has to be written the same way by the same rules. I don't think there's anything wrong with narration as long as it is detailed, not digressive, and well-written.

*Readers hate this, by the way. That's why so many people fail to finish Ulysses.

Eva Ibbotson

2010-10-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

I read today that writer Eva Ibbotson died last week. She was one of my "discoveries" when I began reading childrens/YA books again as an adult. Ibbotson made her name with fantasy aimed at slightly younger readers like Which Witch? and Island of the Aunts, but I really liked some of her later stuff, particularly Star of Kazan, which is set in pre-war Vienna.

A couple of things I didn't know about Ibbotson which I found out in the obit. She was born in 1925, which made her 85 when she died. (I never picture my favorite writers as old, somehow.) She published her first children's book at 50. (All right!) She was born in Vienna into a Jewish family which fled to England in 1933. She got a degree in physiology and studied at Cambridge. She married an entomologist. (I seem to recall butterflies playing a role in Journey to the River Sea, which is about the Amazon.)

I'm sorry we'll never see any future books from Ibbotson (unless she left some in manuscript.) And if you haven't read her, you have a delight in front of you.

Awards!

2010-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Carole Anne Carr recently presented my other blog, The Paris Hat, with a Literacy Builder Award. This means I have to name 5 favorite words and pass it on to 3 other bloggers. I'm going to do this on Pray for Rain as there are more followers and maybe it fits the theme better? Anyway, thanks Carole Anne! I had trouble picking out only five favorite words, but here they are:

shimmy

brassiere

djinn

charley horse

nemesis

My three bloggers are:

Booknapped by Marie Devers, even though she hasn't posted much lately (something about being pregnant.) Hopefully she'll start up again when she has more time.

Katie M. Stout - One Page at a Time, because she covers so many literary topics.

Mary Aalgaard - Play Off the Page, which is always chock full of literate quotes.

By the way, if you believe Wikipedia, a charley horse is known as a "granddaddy" in the UK, a "horse's kiss" in German and a "corky" in Australia.

Adventures in Critiquing

2010-10-15T09:54:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I joined Critique Circle, an online critique group. I also found a local critque group and have attended two of their meetings. This has been a big step, though not for the reason I thought it would be. I knew that reading my work in front of people, even friendly people, would be a bit hard for mem but I managed it in the end. No, the problem turned out to be critiquing other people. I did everything I was supposed to on Critique Circle: I read all the FAQs, the Newbie page, I looked up archived critiques to see how others did it. The way Critique Circle works, you have to critique other stories in order to earn credits to put up your own stuff. So after a week or two of research, I finally dived in and critiqued one of the short stories. I can say two things about my critique: 1) it was honest and 2) it was nicely phrased -- no rudeness. Exactly what the guidelines said it should be. And yet I went around very troubled afterwards. Perhaps the person who put up the story hadn't expected or wanted honesty. Perhaps I had stopped someone's writing in their tracks or persuaded the person to toss the story. I didn't like the thought that I might have disturbed someone's confidence in their own writing. And yet, secretly, I was kind of proud of my critique. I like critiquing. I have definite opinions about certain things, and I like to express them.
So it was as a very conflicted person that I went to my critique group and proceeded to make a rookie error -- reading them a scene I had revised in a fury and hadn't really re-read. They didn't hate it, but they pointed out some problems, and, being new in the group, (this was only the second thing I'd read) I came away thinking I must have looked like someone who couldn't write at all. Believe me, I saw the irony in all this.
When I'm in doubt or turmoil I try to fall back on what I call the Two-Day Rule. Wait two days before making a decision about this. Give yourself some perspective, let your emotions fade. (This sounds wise, but it also allows two days of pure nobody-loves-me-think-I'll-eat-some-worms wallowing.) So sure enough, Monday came and I got a little perspective and began to re-structure my ruined scene. And I got an message on Critique Circle from the person who wrote the story, thanking me for giving her an honest critique! I promptly and boldly then went out and critiqued two more stories and submitted one of my own (won't get any feedback on it for a week or so.) So I might get the hang of this yet. Or I might be repeating the two-day rule to myself again one of these days.
Anywaym as a Giant of Critiquing, I am now my proclaiming my official disapproval of two things:
The one-sentence paragraph.
The. One. Word. Sentence.
Maybe I'll do a post about them one of these days...after I've gone back over my own writing to edit out all the times I've done it myself.

The Scottish Play

2010-10-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

One summer when I was in high school I went with a group of friends to a Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Richard III. Richard III is one of Shakespeare's longer plays, and it got to be kind of late and we were all a little sleepy by the time Richard was being visited by the ghosts of all the people he had had put to death. Then we heard the sound of a motorcycle. It crossed the park, ripping up the grass, and began to circle the stage and the audience, fading in and out as the actor playing Richard struggled to make himself heard. It was pitch dark except for a few lights on the stage and an array of floodlights on the hill behind us. The motorcyle returned, and we heard wild cries and laughter. It was at the top of the hill now, and I remember turning and seeing the cyclist silhouetted by the lights, standing up on the pedals with his fist raised towards the stage. We heard him shout: "Hail, Satan...Hail, Satan!"
Then he turned and zoomed down the other side of the hill, fading back into the night.

Well, such scenes can happen only once in a lifetime. I don't expect, when I go to see Macbeth next week, that it will be interrupted by a Satanist on a motorcycle, though I can always hope. Anyway, in preparation for it I've been going over certain key parts of the Macbeth with my son so he can follow it when we go see it. I had forgotten how gruesome it is. Two appearance by witches, Banquo's ghost, the murder of Macduff's family, and someone's head being carried onstage. I'd also forgotten that Macbeth is the source of such familar quotes as:

"By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes."

"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

And, of course:

"Out, damned spot!"

One of the best books I've read about Shakespeare is Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Shakespeare. (There are also companion volumes on Jane Austen and Dickens.) Not exactly biography, and not exactly criticism, these books focus on the relationship between the reader and favorite authors, teasing out what makes Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens seem like old friends. If you haven't read it, go look for it.

SCBWI Fall Workshop

2010-09-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

So I've dipped my toe in and I find I'm late to the party, as usual...(ooh, mixed metaphor!)
On Saturday my local SCBWI chapter sponsored a workshop. Chris Eboch, author of The Well of Sacrifice and the Haunted series, was there to do critiques and lead us through a workshop on description. She was amazing in a your-favorite-teacher kind of way -- easygoing, unassuming and yet so professional and full of good advice.
We also had peer critiques in the morning, and a session with Nancy Davis, an illustrator who lives here in Las Vegas now and has done some fantastic illustrations for picture books.
Best of all, I found a local critique group which meets on Saturdays. And I met a dozen or so people who are doing what I do and who couldn't have been more friendly.
As I said in a previous post, a year ago I couldn't have done this. The idea of reading to or letting strangers read my work would have been excruciating. But I got to this point partly because of blogging. The past year has drawn me out of being the one weird person who wrote and made things so much easier. I think the latest of my illusions to be shattered is the idea that you can do it alone.

On the scale

2010-09-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

I was always the skinniest girl in my class, as well as the shortest and the flattest. For many years I never topped 110 pounds. I never dieted and I never worried about what I ate. When I got pregnant I gained a reasonable amount of weight and lost most of it quickly. (Breast-feeding helps.) I lived in NYC, so I climbed subway stairs and I took the kid out in the stroller up and down Ocean Parkway and I bicycled to church.
Then I moved to Las Vegas. I did try to walk somewhere not long after I got here, but it was hotter than I realized (in April!) and suddenly the sidewalk stopped and I had to pick my way across a construction site. Before long the 120s were a distant memory. I began working out, but the numbers on the scale kept going up. I'd been a vegetarian for many years, but I'd drifted away from the "combine proteins" mantra that was predominant when I'd learned how to cook vegetarian. At the end of the summer, two years ago, I was over 150. And I was sick, which is what prompted me to reform. I drastically changed my diet, lowering carbs and increasing protein, and the way I worked out (goodbye 45 minutes of cardio, hello weights.) I stopped eating between meals and I took a grim pleasure in never having any birthday cake at office parties. The numbers on the scale began to fall.
I don't expect to ever gain that weight back as long as I continue to work out and eat the way I do now. But as the numbers began to fall something unexpected awoke in me.
I was part of the generation which "discovered" anorexia. It was fashionable when I was in high school. I never had anywhere near the problems that most anorexics do, but I flirted with the idea. And now I find, standing on the scale, that the belief that my worth as a person depends on whether the level finds its mark at 124 or 126 is still there after all these years.
Weight is such a funny thing. I'm almost on the verge of not posting this, because I guess I think if you write about your weight, you're opening yourself up for almost any kind of criticism. Part of me thinks it's frivolous, I suppose.
I'm trying to write a scene where a character is standing on a scale and battering the slider back and forth, as if she doesn't care what it will come out to. I haven't gotten it right yet, and I haven't been able to fit it in where I want it to go. But it will go somewhere, because it's important.

Back to School Blogfest

2010-09-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

Roh Morgan of Musings of a Moonlight Writer is sponsoring a Back to School Daze blogfest. Go check out the others at her site!
The section below is from HOW TO SEE THE ELEPHANT, YA historical fiction, set in 1862.

The stair and hall carpets were trodden gray by schoolgirl slippers. In the art room there was the same bowl of fruit as on the day the name Thefish was coined, along with a plaster statue of a Greek slave and a large etching of the Roman Forum. The same thick pencils and erasers, ten girls sketching and rubbing and blowing on the paper. The same grammar and history lessons, papers screwed up and thrown into the unlit fireplace, and compositions begun again, copied and recopied until they were entirely free of inkblots. No matter what the class the same subject studied all the time: young ladies. Young ladies did not tell lies or raise their voices. (This I already knew.) They did not cross their legs. They did not let their backs touch the back of a sofa or chair. They did not indulge in coffee or tea, which sapped vitality. They avoided the grosser cuts of animal flesh. They did not whistle. They did not drink excessively chilled water. They did not belabor their minds with serious reading; nor did they display a weakness for frivolous novels. They did not say “oh, yummy!” when dinner was announced. They did not yawn before eight o’clock in the evening. They did not jump up and down so they could watch their bosoms bounce. (I was not guilty of this last one.) They did not open bedroom windows and let in the night air. They did not pinch their cheeks to make them look redder. Above all, young ladies did not want things – things they could have or things that could happen. “Want must be your master,” they said to us. Mama had said that, too. I had never really understood what it meant.
This was what I had wanted. This was education. It was music and French verbs and the Great Men of History. So why did I sit there with my eyes on the window, where the rain was now ending, hoping for a fire engine to pass? Why did I close my eyes and imagine what I’d be doing right now on the wagon? The smell of harness and horse, the rhythm of hooves, dogs barking as we came into town. I would be reading the map to Pa, persuading him that a certain route would save us a half-hour on the way to Princeton. Or talking to one of the wholesalers about a new kind of spade...
What was someone who could do all that, who’d been as good as an adult for the past two years, doing here? I looked around the rest of the class. Jenny was rubbing her pen along the edge of her nose, something she did every day to give it (the nose, not the pen) a more distinguished shape. Sarah Stephens was drawing a row of monkeys down the side of her composition on “Ambition.”
“Miss Wymore?”
“Yes, Miss Matilda?”
“I don’t believe you have recited for us.”
“Me?”
“ ‘I’, Miss Wymore.”
“I? You mean me?”
Miss Matilda sighed, to laughter all around. “Yes, you, Miss Wymore. Please come up and recite. You may choose any selection in the reader.”
I stood up, smoothing my apron, and walked towards the front of the class. The Fourth Reader lay open on Miss Matilda’s lectern to “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” I closed it with a small thump and turned to the class.
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,”
I said,
“And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea...”
I let my hands wave just a bit to suggest the sea. If you make too many gestures when you recite you start to look ridiculous.
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;”
As I spoke I watched the girls. Jenny was no longer rubbing her nose. Polly was sitting with widened eyes, as was Ellen. Sarah had stopped drawing and was looking at me as if I might prove to be not uninteresting.
“…And the widows of Ashur are loud in the wail!”
I proclaimed,
“And the idols are broken in the temple of Baal!”
I shook my fist.
“ And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,”
I paused and looked around the room, careful to hold their attention. Lord Byron wrote the ending kind of punchy, but I liked to give it slow, letting the line build to a triumphant conclusion:
“Hath melted like snow... in the glance of the Lord!”
Applause? Yes, real applause, not just grudging claps. Ellen turned and smiled as I made my way back to my seat.
“Well,” said Miss Matilda. “Well. Thank you, Miss Wymore. Thank you very much.”
I sat back down, trying not to look triumphant. None of them knew how many times I had slain the fourth reader class in Mansfield with that old chestnut.

Happy New Year

2010-09-08T11:09:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning it rained. It was the best kind of rain: unexpected, creeping up over us in the middle of the night and turning the morning soft and gray. Puddles on the porch and the smell of rain in the air. Headlights on cars as I drove in to work. Thick clouds with dramatic shafts of light breaking through over the valley. I delighted in it all the more because not one single mention was made on the weather of the possibility of rain. It was like someone saying, miracles still happen.
It was like the beginning of fall, too. This is a great time of year in the desert, where we look at seasons differently. We don't say "summer is over." We say, "the heat is over." Now we begin to emerge and think of hikes and trips and 5k runs and Shakespeare in the Park and planting vegetables and re-doing the garden.
The other great thing about this time of year is that I work at a Jewish-sponsored school so I get a bunch of holidays, all in a row. It throws my routine way off, but I look forward to it. I'm finally getting my hair cut and I have a bunch of slow-cooker recipes I want to try and there'll be lots of time for writing. So if I'm not around for awhile, that's what I'm doing. See you in October.

The Street Diary

2010-09-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

After the last post I went back and looked at the "Street Diary" I kept when I was living in NYC and I've decided to post some of the entries below. My intent keeping this diary was just to write down overheard conversations or scenes of small everyday importance. I started out calling it a "Subway Diary" but I expanded it to any public area, especially streets. I was fascinated by encounters and interactions between strangers (or not) in the streets of the city and on public transportation.

All you really need to know to understand what follows is that I lived in Brooklyn in a Russian/Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and I worked in midtown Manhattan. A Yeshiva (if you haven't seen Yentl) is an Orthodox Jewish school.

July 15, 1997 Greenwich Street between Canal and Spring St., Manhattan, 6:30 pm

Written (painted) across a building: WATER SPILLED FROM SOURCE TO USE. Next door, a wooden board rests on the sidewalk – COOKBOOKS.

The door (a house) is propped open with a small brass teapot. Red carpet, start of a wall of books half-visible.

Across the street, faintly visible, with imagination, painted on the side of the building -- Fletcher's Castoria.

August 1, 1997 F train to Brooklyn 5:10 pm

The girl next to me, smartly dressed (beige dress, silk scarf), lanky hair behind her ears, smooth, bright face, asked: “Can you tell me approximately how long it will take this train to get to the World Trade Center?”

“Is this the E train?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I leaned forward to look at the sign. “No, this is the F. You’re on the wrong train.”

“How did that happen?”

“They run on the same track – the first two stations in Manhattan they’re on the same track.”

“What should I do?”

“You can change at West Fourth. Go downstairs – “

She did not understand when I said, “three or four stops,” thinking I meant the World Trade Center. “No – 23^rd St, 14^th St, West 4^th St.” She pulled out a map and I showed her, “the blue, that’s the E train. Go downstairs – I’m sorry, go upstairs.” An Asian guy in a suit, wearing glasses, carrying a briefcase was listening, he nodded now.

She put her hands to her face. “I’m so late already.” As much to him as me, “I’m meeting someone I haven’t seen in four years.”

Boredom, slightly, as we were only at 34^th St – now I would either have to talk to her or interrupt myself at West 4^th to remind her to get off.

When she stood up the Asian man was getting off too – “Are you going that way…” she asked.

August 15, 1997 M-1 bus, Fifth Avenue, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Tourists on the bus.

“Mom, look at that cathedral.”

“Gosh, that is huge.”

After a pause, she adds:

“I think that’s the one that was in a book or something.”

“Do they have any gargoyles?” the boy says, and repeats, “gargoyles?…gargoyles?…”

October 11, 1997 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

Homeless man lying on a bench under a thick red blanket (coat?). Calls out to me:

“What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

November 13, 1997 Fifth Avenue E/F station (upstairs) 5 pm

The way was blocked.

“The platform is full,” one of the MTA workers said. No one could hear. “Both platforms?” A man with an Indian accent said angrily, “I can assure you the platform to Queens is not crowded.” The MTA guy ignored him. A woman pushed through. “They are not letting anyone through – I can’t wait!” she cried.

“But people are coming up! You should let people through as people come up!”

“Come on – I’ve got sitters to pick up!”

“I can assure you,” the Indian man said again, “The platform to Queens is not crowded.”

“Assure us?” a voice said.

“Yes, I can assure you! I will bet you 100 dollars! 100 dollars! Do you want to bet 100 dollars? Do you have 100 dollars in your pocket right now?”

When I got downstairs the platform was as near to deserted as I have seen in weeks.

November/December 1997 Wednesday nights, 18^th Ave./Newkirk Ave. B8 bus stop, Brooklyn

Yeshiva boys. They pace the sidewalk, talking so fast you can hardly understand them. And then an odd word comes up – “Flubber” – for instance. Once one said in a mocking voice, “uh…what’s nudity?” and the one beside him sniggered. Last week a car drew up and the woman on the passenger side said: “Where are you going?”

“47^th and 18^th.”

“Well, we will take – I don’t know how many will fit – but we will take –"

Four piled in, one came out. Off the car went.

“Benny got a ride with a stranger.”

December 15, 1997 1 pm

One of those stray sentences you hear sometimes, floating, on the street. In front of Archiva, Madison and 75^th Street – a middle-aged woman, barely seen, behind me, looking at the window display.

“Books have come so far."

June 16, 1998 10 pm, cab across the Brooklyn Bridge

Jostling in traffic. A man in a sport utility vehicle refused to let the cab into his lane. Rolling down the window he said, “You do it to me all the time.” The driver (Russian?), a middle-aged man, began muttering, “What’s the hurry? We’re all going to the same place…” (I thought he meant across the Brooklyn Bridge) “…six feet under, right?”

Dear Diary

2010-08-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

I've kept a diary off and on most of my adult life. (I also kept diaries as a teen but shortly before I left for college I lit a bonfire and burned them in a grand melodramatic style.) There are a number of reasons why people keep diaries, besides needing something to read on the train, but I've never been sure where I fall on that spectrum. A large part is blowing off steam, of course. The diary will never judge you, no matter how much you whine about traffic and stupid people and waiting at the doctor's office. There's also, on a more practical note for a writer, the art of description -- the opportunity for a word picture of the person sitting opposite you in the doctor's waiting room. When I lived in NYC I kept a "Street Diary," which was just descriptions of people and/or scenes I had witnessed on the streets and subways, scribbled down irregularly. This was great practice for writing and I recommend it to anyone but it's hard to keep it up in suburbs, where there is less public space.
The constantly true thing about any diary is that the important stuff never gets written down or gets written down too late. Big emotional issues are too large to grapple with on daily basis most of the time. Sometime things that become important start out very small and by the time they are important it's too late to describe them accurately. But I keep going, hoping I'm capturing at least part of myself at this particular stage of life.
I think writers fall into two categories -- internal and external. Some writers burn entirely off their own emotions and all their creations stem from their own central dramas. (Writers who live highly dramatic lives, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Patricia Highsmith, often fall into this first category.) Others don't look inside themselves much but feed off observing and analyzing people. I fall mostly into the second category. I'm fascinated by people. I think I'm going to try and re-orient my diary into less blowing off steam and more looking outward and observing daily life.

Lying to the blog

2010-08-19T11:51:00.001-07:00

I think I've sort of been lying to/hiding from this blog for the past two weeks, which accounts for the disconnected posts. I guess I shy away from updates as they actually happen...I like to put things in perspective. When I got back from vacation I found an email in my in-box which was one of those rejections-with-feedback. I didn't want to revise How to See the Elephant again because every revision has bogged down and pushed me closer to the edge but I took a few days to think about it and then made some notes and outlines and then got started. And it really wasn't so bad -- I was just focusing on one chapter, not the whole thing, so maybe that limited the insanity. Then I emailed the agent who has been looking at the ms since May and it turned out she hasn't actually looked at it yet (agents, I conclude, go by God's time) so I asked it I could send her the revised revision and now that's accomplished.

Now I should go back to the WIP but the truth is that I've rewritten the first 50 pages of the WIP so many times I've lost count and I can't get beyond a certain point. I have a lot of good ideas but they're all scattered and I can't seem to get them into an appropriate structure. And I've been tempted by the idea of going back and revising a long-abandoned manuscript instead.

So that's where I am and there's not much more to say.

I do want to put a plug in, though. My 12 year old son has a blog, YE's Hurricane Tracker. Now, unless you are extremely interested in Eastern Pacific hurricanes, you may not want to follow it but I'm really proud of how he's taken off with it, putting up posts and changing the background design, adding in tables and widgets and all kinds of stuff. His obsession with hurricanes is long-standing but I take some comfort in the fact that the ones in the Eastern Pacific generally go out to sea and don't kill anyone.

Going to see the sheep

2010-08-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

This has become a late-summer tradition. The bighorns stay up in the mountains in the spring and early summer, but this time of year and then through the winter months they descend on a small park in Boulder City. There's kind of a interesting co-existence: kids play on the swings, people sit in the picnic shelters, and the sheep crop the grass all around. Last year we sat on a blanket and the sheep crept around us so close we could hear them breathing.

The co-existence ended this year when someone idiotically, but not intentionally I think, threw a Frisbee.

Back to School: Ancient Languages

2010-08-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know how a classical education survived into the 70s in a state not famed for its educational opportunities, but I do know the high school I went to offered Latin, and my mother -- I won't say made, but I will say "leaned on" -- me to take it.
The first phrase we learned was puella pulchra (beautiful girl.) Immediately there was a student who didn't understand how a word like silvia (woods) could be female. Or how any word could be male or female. He became known as First Declension Man because he never got any further. The rest of us translated sentences from our textbook, sentences like: " 'Let us cross the river and make camp there,' Caesar said to his troops" and "The men drank too much wine and danced around the house." By third year there were four of us left, sitting in the back of the second year class, reading the Aeneid, scribbling down our translations and asking Mrs. Harrod tangled grammar questions.
When I came out of it I knew what the pluperfect was. And the subjunctive mood. And an indirect object. (10 years of English and they still hadn't drilled that into me!) I had baked a placenta (cake) and taken it to to the Foreign Language Club and not suprisingly no one had eaten it. And I was motivated to take Ancient Greek in the first two semesters of college.
What did I get out of it all? Well, when I went to Rome I could read the inscriptions on the buildings. I could sort of read Italian, too. (I was tripped up by Domingo/Sunday on a train schedule but the Romans didn't have days of the week so how could I know?) I could decipher allusions in The Hunger Games. (Panem = bread as in bread and circuses.) But probably the best thing was that I hardly ever again have encountered a word in English I didn't know. Knowing Latin and Greek, even long after the grammar faded away, made words useful to me.
Looking back, Latin class is one of my better memories of high school. There was a sense of a world opening up. It seemed to be more about discovering something new, of acquiring autonomy, than boring memorization of vocabulary. The language came to us, flexible and mysterious, and we played with it. (I made Mrs. Harrod laugh once by translating Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book.")
So in this back to school season, I hope someone somewhere is taking Latin.

Summer Interlude

2010-08-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

When you live in the desert you look to the mountains for water, greenery and coolness. Sometimes you don't believe in these things until they're right in front of you. On the road to Angel Lake you circle round double twists and turns with a cliff and no guardrail on your right side. And then the road twists around again and you see this:

Follow the creek long enough and you find yourself singing, the hills are alive/with the sound of music...

Then there's the road up the canyon. One side dust and sagebrush. The other side, beyond the trees, an entirely green world:

Save the Date

2010-07-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

I've always lamented that I don't really know any local writers or writing groups in my area. No conferences, no workshops. I did go to a meet and greet at the library last year but I couldn't make myself heard over the Elvis impersonator. (No, really.) Well, now I've discovered that the Nevada chapter of the SCBWI is having a craft workshop here on September 18, with MG historical ficiton writer Chris Eboch as special guest. There will be peer critiques and (for a fee) an individualized critique as well. A year ago this would have been impossible for me. I've always been extremely private about my writing. I had to drag myself kicking and screaming down the blog road and even to go to the library thing last year. So the fact that I'm looking forward to this more than I'm dreading it -- in fact, I'm kicking myself now for not going for the individualized critique when I filled out the registration form -- means I've grown. I know a lot of you out there have done the conference thing before and I'm looking forward to joining you.

In Which the Title of this Blog Becomes True

2010-07-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

7/19/10 7:20 AM PDT Temp: 96 F
I know one thing: there must always be iced tea in the refrigerator. When there is an interruption in the iced-tea cycle (as occured over the weekend, when it was discovered that my husband bought a new bag of sugar but didn't bring it home from the store), hoarding breaks out.
Heatwave eating tips: good meals -- pasta salad, potato salad, hummus; best meal - leftover birthday cake.
Ordinary car air conditioners can't deal with this. They blow cold air on your arms while crystal drops of sweat roll down your temples. Ordinary home a/c blows and blows all night and makes sleep just barely possible. When I turn on the shower I have to let the water run to cool off. At the outdoor pools children swim in hot water.
Through it all clouds form and come and go, first white, then gray, but not yet stormy and black. Something is lacking. It could be as prosaic as moisture in the upper atmosphere, but I prefer to think of it as energy or will, something personal that makes the clouds stir and show their hands, to prove that they are capable of producing rain but won't do it just to please you.
Maybe next week. It will happen (won't it?) and then for each person in Las Vegas the rain will be personal and different: huge grasshopper drops leaping off the back patio; jolts of thunder and lightning that bring shoppers out of Petsmart to view the parking lot, awash; drops that fall so slowly you can count each one as it fades into the sidewalk.
Then the bonus of August nights: rattling storms in the mountains; the hope inspired by the weather service's beep-beep-beep; the backyard in the morning wet and smelling, for once, like a garden should.

Aura

2010-07-14T14:21:00.001-07:00

When I began to get bad headaches about 10 years I resisted the idea that they might be migraines because I'd heard that people who had migraines "saw things." Alas, I discovered that is it possible to have very ordinary and painful migraines without "seeing things" at all. (These are known as common rather than classic migraines.)

Then one day in the gym I sat up from doing crunches and noticed that what I had taken for an afterimage of the ceiling tiles was still in front of my left eye. It was a series of small boxes, composed of boxes within boxes within boxes, like an optical illusion, that made an arc across my vision. It just hung there, shaking and shimmering, transparent, and yet not, and I didn't know what to think until I remembered that I'd seen a similar picture in a book about migraines. Oh my, I thought, so this is a migraine aura. I guess I was a little excited: even as I made my way out of the gym I couldn't help telling people I met about it. Just as I was wondering how I was going to drive home, the boxes began to fade.

That was three years ago. Last week it happened again. It started as a little blurry spot in the middle of my vision, which made it somewhat hard to read a computer screen. I ignored it. The spot became a series of little intersecting lines, like a Cubist painting, and then bloomed into a set of jagged teeth, bent double upon itself. There was nothing to do but sit and wait for it to pass, which it did after about 10 minutes. Interestingly enough, neither this time nor the last time did I get a real full-blown migraine, just a slight headache-y feeling.

A lot of books and articles have been written about migraine aura, many of which speculate that people in the past who claimed to have visions were actually experiencing aura instead. I can accept this in some cases, I suppose, but it's also kind of disappointing. As I understand it, when I see aura, there's something going on my brain: a message is being sent. But the message is inscrutable and random. Why boxes and lines?

By the way, an update on that postcard from WWII. I found one of George A. Paris' daughters (on Facebook, naturally) and sent it to her. She wrote back saying:
"My mother is still alive and doing quite well at 87 years old. We had a perfect childhood any person would want, there was plenty of love and laughter. The family is still very close all because of the bond they built for us."

Salome

2010-07-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

I loved this painting, by the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau, when I was a teenager. My father will probably deny this, but he once made me remove a poster of it from the living room because he said it was depressing. For those who don't know the story, Salome dances for her stepfather, King Herod, who promises in return to give her anything she wants. At the suggestion of her mother she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger. Herod says, "Well, I didn't mean that." But she insists and Herod has sworn an unbreakable oath, so that's the end of John the Baptist. A week or so ago, after re-reading Oscar Wilde's play Salome (banned in England for 34 years!) I found myself writing a story about her. It's historical fantasy, which is a genre I'm both attracted to but unsure about my ability to work in. For Moreau and Wilde, the point of the story of Salome is that women are lustful and evil (call me crazy, but I don't think that Wilde really has street cred on that theme.) The original Biblical story, however, doesn't mention sex at all: John the Baptist's death is a palace intrigue, no more.

I found myself writing from Salome's point of view, trying to understand a character who is willful and spoiled but not wanting to go in the women-are-evil direction. And what came out was a focus on desire for things -- luxuries, material goods that, in my story, Herod promises without being able to provide.

How should I know what I wanted? Staring off into the air he’d list things – things he’d had once maybe, or things he thought we ought to have, if our luck turned. Dishes shaped like cranes and fish; painted bowls that turned your hands blood-red while you washed them; salt from distant lands, less brittle than our local salt, with the taste of the sea, and tints of purple; little potted trees, that we might plant and see if they would thrive; the bones of ancient giants – collecting such things was a craze in Rome; all the wisdom of the ages, written by blind men on grains of rice. Also jewels, of course – but after Mama no one could be impressed with jewels – and every kind of clothing and scent and headdresses.
Herod believed in these things. If I’d named just one, he’d have found a way to manage it.
Around that time a fad took the court for a new kind of drum that had been invented to the south, in the marshlands. It was a tiny thing, stretched with ostrich skin, but played right anyone could dance to it, they said. I found this to be true. Somehow I could catch the rhythm and then I hardly knew the hours passed, even as drummer after drummer stumbled away with swollen hands.
I wanted no more than to dance for the sun, outside, in the morning and again in the evening.

I enjoyed writing it but I'm not sure what to do with the result. It needs work and I've never felt short stories to be my forte. For now I'll probably just file it away. This is the second history fantasy I've written in the past two months, when I'm supposed to be concentrating on my WIP. I'm not really sure what my brain is up to.

Sidelines blogfest

2010-07-08T08:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks for Cheree at Justified Lunacy for hosting the Sidelines blogfest, focusing on secondary characters. Go check out the others!
This is from How to See the Elephant. Background info - September 1862. Delaware. Possibility of Confederate invasion. The students at Thetis' boarding school have been taken on an excursion to the country to escape the heat. On the boat Thetis learns that her father has been wounded in battle. When they reach their destination, Thetis and Ellen, her only friend at the school, sit in a cornfield while Thetis tries to decide what she's going to do now.

We were in a cornfield. It had been harvested and bundled but broken stalks still poked up and ears, husks and leaves were scattered everywhere. Even in the heat, flocks of blackbirds were feeding, hopping around the dead cornstalks, poking at the ears and fighting each other. At any moment some were circling up and others landing, little black dots moving and jumping, all the time going arr-arr-arr and squeaking like a whole field of rusty doors.
“Why, the poor farmer!” Ellen said. “They’re eating everything!”
“Those are just the leftovers. It’s like the husks the prodigal son fed on.”
We sat then for a long time, just watching the birds. In spite of the way they seethed and hopped and pecked I saw something peaceful in it all. It did not feel like summer was gone, but it was, and the birds were feeding for the winter ahead. And before the winter came there would be battles in fields like this. The soldiers massed south of here would lie in cornfields and shoot each other. They might be doing so now.
This thought should have frightened me. Instead, it seemed, like the silence and the river, the only real thing in the world.
Ellen said:
“My father’s going to take me to my aunt’s in Brooklyn at Christmas. Maybe you could write your father and he would let you come, too.”
“It’s kind of you to offer. I can’t though – I won’t be here.”
Ellen looked puzzled. “I didn’t know you were leaving.”
“My father’s not pulling me out, if that’s what you mean. He’s been wounded, in Kentucky. Amaryllis told me when we were on the boat. I’m going to run away, as soon as it gets dark, and go to him. I can get to Louisville tomorrow night, on the train. I’m going to start looking for him there.”
I saw her looking at me strangely and for a second I thought she wanted to come along. I nerved myself to say no. I certainly wasn’t going to drag anyone extra along, not with time of the essence.
“I don’t know how badly he’s wounded. Anything could happen, and he needs someone to take care of him. Anyway, I can’t stay at Miss Barclay’s. There’s nothing there for me. I thought I knew – I thought I wanted – ” My thoughts swirled and tumbled like bits of straw in a draft. A whole new person. The girls looking at me, during the storm.
“I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell anyone. Though it won’t matter if you do, because I’m going anyway.”
I had thought nothing in the world could ever make Ellen mad. I was wrong. She stood up, her tiny face concentrated, like a baby’s, into fury, as she pulled her sunbonnet back on.
“What do you think I am? A sneak? Do you think I’m like Jenny or something? Is that what you think of me?”
“No.”
“Wasn’t I nice to you all these months? Wasn’t I? Do you think that was easy? Don’t you think I would have preferred to let you go your own way? And did you ever think of me as anything? ”
“Wait – Ellen – please wait!” I pulled at her arm, and when she would not sit down again, stood up as well. “I’m sorry. I…”
But I couldn’t explain myself. I couldn’t explain anything.
She looked at me a long time, and then she said:
“Honestly, Thetis, I think you’re crazy. You don’t even know where you’re going and you don’t know how you’re going to find your father. Anyone with any common sense would wait a few days for the situation to clear up. But I guess that’s your business and I guess I understand how you feel. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it, anyway. Or sneak on you.”
“I can’t wait a few days. The invasion might start. Or Pa might die. Besides…”
I knew she was right. But there were things I could not tell her. How I had failed to write to Pa – how Amaryllis had lied, and would keep on lying, thinking she was protecting me – but most of all how everything had turned to ashes in the past twenty-four hours, and how I could not bear to look at or think about it. I was not the cuckoo in the nest I had been in Mansfield and yet I had failed to become anyone new. All I could do was shut it all out of my mind, and run…

Secondary Characters

2010-07-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

Cheree at Justified Lunacy is hosting a blogfest featuring secondary characters on July 8th. I've signed up, and so should you. It was kind of hard choosing a good scene, though. I find I use secondary characters especially, though I hope not too much, for humor. They bring light and nice counterweight to many scenes. I also like the character who only appears once but does a great star turn and is vital to the plot.
I would never draw a major character entirely from a single real-life person, but with secondary characters I find it fun to do so. For instance, for the past four years I've worked with someone who is not only very talkative but who assumes that anything connected with her life, no matter how trival, is of absorbing interest to everyone around her. Were I a real writer, instead of "telling" you this, I would be "showing" you, by reproducing the classic "I saw this bag in my freezer and I thought it was mangoes but actually it was carrots" conversation, as well as the immortal "I went to get my watch fixed and it wasn't ready and they said come back in a week" drama, but around this time of day energy tends to flag. Anyway, should I complain? I wrote her into a story this weekend.

Christmas in July

2010-06-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

I bought a used copy online of Junior Miss, by Sally Benson, thinking it might be a good book for my other blog, The Paris Hat. When I opened it this is what fell out. It was sent by a George A. Paris of the 286th Signal Corps from the Italian front in November 1943.
Google suggests that this is probably the same George A. Paris who died in Manchester, New Hampshire in January 1998 at age 82. According to his obituary he worked in a shoe factory and at a meat counter. He had 6 children and 25 grandchildren. Like many people in Manchester he was of French-Canadian descent, which probably accounts for the spelling mistakes in his postcard.
I could probably find out more through the magic of the internet, but I already feel like a snoop.

The Summer Place

2010-06-24T15:19:00.001-07:00

When I was growing up, pools were big rectangles of concrete built for adults. In fact, the Y where I swam growing up blew the whistle at a quarter to every hour, the signal for all the kids to get out of the pool so the adults could paddle around for fifteen minutes, while we sat kicking our legs and looking at the clock. It was clear we didn't belong. Swimming was for elderly people to improve their cardiovascular function. It was exercise. It was serious.
The pools here in Las Vegas are activity pools. They resemble water parks: three feet deep at most, with slides and fountains and splash buckets and beach entries. They're really fun -- when you have a two year old.
But then your two year old grows up and knows how to swim but he can't swim at the activity pools because the water's not deep enough and anyway there's no room because of all the two year olds.
There's a public pool near my neighborhood that no one ever goes to. Why knows why? Maybe most of the households already have pools. Maybe everyone's forgotten about it. Maybe it's the lack of fountains and slides and splash buckets. Whatever the reason, it's become the rediscovered pool for us. Though it's just a big concrete rectangle it's on the edge of a park, so you can float and look at trees and grass and people going by on bikes. I like the architecture, which might best be described as Fake Swiss Cottage, too. And no one ever blows the whistle and tells the kids they have to get out of the pool.

Rocky Ridge

2010-06-17T19:28:00.001-07:00

On vacation last week in Missouri I went to Rocky Ridge Farm, home of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I sometimes think there must be a Laura Ingalls gene, because not only did I grow up on the books, but my son, who doesn't read much, loves them as well, and he particularly likes the modern continuations of them which take up the life of Rose Wilder.

It was a beautiful June day, very green, and the farm was shaded by huge trees. The house is small and was built more or less a room as a time, as their farm succeeded. Laura wrote the books in a narrow office near the front of the house.

There's a weird alchemy to the Little House books. If you re-read them, you notice tons of "Pa builds Ma a shelf" type description but none of it slows the narrative down. You also notice subtler things, like Laura's resentment of Mary, and later, after Mary goes blind, her guilt, and her resentment over her guilt. Like a lot of classics you can't quite see how it's done, but you can feel that it works.

Leo Huberman

2010-06-06T15:05:00.001-07:00

As mentioned in my previous post, I was going to buy The Dark Divine this weekend. Actually, I didn't -- and nothing against it as a book. I still may get it at the library (I'll be #15 on the hold list.) Instead I bought The Book Thief, which about 2-3 years ago was a book with about the same status as The Dark Divine -- that is, I wanted it but couldn't get it. Of course I'd forgotten about it until I saw it in B&N. If you delight Amazon's heart by following the link you'll see it's a Holocaust book, of sorts. There's a character in it name Hubermann. The first, slight, coincidence is that I used the name Huberman for a character in my WIP perhaps two weeks ago. I chose that name on purpose. Why? Well, that's a much larger coincidence.
When I first moved to Brooklyn in the early 1990s it was to an apartment building and neighborhood that was mainly Orthodox Jewish and Holocaust survivors (the two groups were not necessarily the same.) One day I went down to the basement to do laundry and I saw an elderly woman with a number on her arm pulling clothes out of the washing machine. I found this, of course, very disturbing. Possibly it was the banality of the situation -- I'd read of concentration camp tattoos in books and now in front of me was a skinny arm with a long-blurred number (only 4 digits!) fishing up unmentionables from the depths of her machine. It's one thing to know the "reality" of something via fiction. It's another to think that the lady next to you in the laundry room, who just wants to get her clothes out of the washer, has seen things that you wouldn't want to have in your nightmares.
I had a similar reaction when I first met one of my neighbors in the building, an elderly man named Leo Huberman. His apartment was pristine, and, suspecting he was a recent widower, I asked casually after his wife. He said, in apparent seriousness, "Have you ever heard of Auschwitz? My wife and my son died there."
I wish I could say that I said something comforting or deeply moving in reply, but I didn't. I was just too young and too socially unskilled. Neither "I'm sorry" or "that's too bad" seemed at all adequate to "My wife and my son died in Auschwitz." I just stood there awkwardly, looking at the floor, hoping to think of a way to change the subject.
I only saw Mr. Huberman a few times after that. Once I brought him some soup. It was a weird potato-pumpkin kind of soup that I had made from a Vegetarian Times recipe. It might have been decent if I'd had a blender, but I didn't, and I recall it as pretty dismal, although at the time I was very proud of it. (Whenever I wonder if there's more comedy than tragedy in life, I think of that soup.)
I must have told Mr. Huberman I was a writer, because he told me I should read a Yiddish writer named I.L. Peretz. Then we sort of drifted apart, although I said hello to him sometimes outside the building. A year or so later, in the middle of a blizzard, I came home to a notice posted on the building door that he was dead, and that services would be held, etc.
One of the things that bothered me after this was the idea that he might be forgotten. He'd had no other children and no other family, at least that I knew of. I committed his name to memory. I spoke of him once at church. The idea of a person's name as their strongest kind of memorial is one that runs through history. So I put it out there again. Leo Huberman. And I wrote his name into my WIP. My Huberman is a minor character, not a great soul but not a pure villain either. Those are the breaks of being written into a novel. Those are the breaks of being a human being as well.

Reasons to be Cheerful

2010-06-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

1. It's still nice in the garden in the morning when I go out to water.

2. I have peppers. (How else can I put this? "My peppers are fruiting?" That doesn't sound right.)

3. There's a agent out there reading the full of How to See the Elephant.

4. I've been hearing a lot about The Dark Divine by Bree Despain and when I looked it up in the LV library catalog it said "14 holds on the first 8 returned copies." So I'll probably just go buy it. New reading!

5. Blogfest! From Amalia T. -- the theme of which is dreams. I found out kind of late, but here's my contribution, from The Poison Hill. The dreamer is my MC, Gertrude. She's living in Italy, about 30 years after most of the action has taken place.

The water is inky black, tossing against the dock. It’s the dock at the lake, the same dock after all these years, but the water goes on forever, all the way to the horizon, under a dark sky. When I get to the white raft out in the center of the lake my mother will be there. I have to be out there at exactly the right time. Clark Gable takes the towel from my shoulders and I dive into the water and swim with great speed, waves bobbing in my face. I see the raft just ahead, dirty white from the dark water. The crowd of people on the dock is screaming, cheering me on. I have to be up on it before sunset. One moment later and my mother will be gone…Something is knocking on the side of the raft, making it shake…the ladder is right before me; I grab at it and begin to climb up… the knocking, again …There is my mother, with long hair and a long dress, like an Edgar Allan Poe illustration… The sun is not down yet; I’m still in time…
But I'm not in time, and Zita is pounding on the door. I know she's standing out in the hall, wondering, knocking and waiting, and knocking again. It’s no good to call avanti. Zita never avanti’s; she waits for you to let her in.

Fun Fact: this actually came from a real dream, although it's been much altered. Have a good weekend and check out the other Dreamfest posts!

24 hours late

2010-06-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

This is a little late, but I wanted to put up something about Memorial Day. I dedicated How to See the Elephant to two sets of family ancestors, one from Ohio, the other from Georgia. I'm not so good at remembering dates and units and similar numbers, but I can give you the gist of their stories.

The Hedges were from Coshocton County, Ohio. They had abolitionist sympathies and it is reputed that their farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad. The oldest, Anderson Hedge, served in 3 different Ohio regiments at various times. He was wounded in the hand at the battle of Iuka, Mississippi (look it up!) in 1862, returned home, and went back to war about a year later. His brother Aaron went with him, as did their younger brother Porter, who was just shy of 16 at the time. Aaron's history is shadowy. Family story is that he was prisoner, and was later exchanged, and this experience damaged his health. In 1864 all three brothers were together at the battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia; fortunately for them (it was one of the bloodiest battles of the war) they were assigned guard the railroad tracks in the rear sector. Porter and Anderson returned home when the war ended, but Aaron served until November 1865 in the Army of Occupation in Texas. Then he returned to his sister's house in Ohio and quite simply laid down and died. There is no way of knowing what actually killed him, but family opinion blamed the war for undermining his health.

The Wilsons were from Early County, Georgia. They were a large family which farmed their own land, and although they owned no slaves at the time of the war, past generations had. Four brothers -- Joe Lane, William, James B. and Marion -- joined the 55th Georgia (a.k.a. "the Early County Wildcats") John M. the youngest, joined the 29th Georgia Cavalry. The 55th Georgia was sent to guard Cumberland Gap in Tennessee. Joe Lane died there in January, 1863. He had been ill, and in being transported to a different location he was dropped in the creek, which caused him to develop pneumonia. In September 1863 Cumberland Gap surrendered, and William and James B. were sent to Camp Douglas, a Union prison camp just outside Chicago. Camp Douglas, on the shores of Lake Michigan, was famed for its unsanitary and inhumane conditions. (A recent History Channel documentary labeled it 80 Acres of Hell.) When the war ended the two made their way back to Early County, and, in a strange parallel to the Hedges, William died shortly after arriving home, probably from the effects of his imprisonment. James B., who was 22 at the war's end, became my great-grandfather. I am unclear about the time period of what follows, but I do know that Marion deserted the 55th Georgia at some point. Family story is that he returned home and his mother hid him in the barn and fed him before sending him on. He didn't come back when the war ended. Possibly he died elsewhere, but I imagine that he may have felt unwelcome, given the price his family paid in the war.
A couple years back my mother discovered that the US government will provide a free headstone for any Civil War veteran -- yes, even for Rebels. She found Joe Lane's grave in the Cumberland Gap battlefield, filled out the proper paperwork, and got one put up for him.
Being a child of the 70s -- one of my earliest memories is the famous "War is not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things" wall poster -- I have very mixed feelings about war in general, and I'm not always comfortable with the glorification of it. But I have no problem honoring the soldiers on both sides.

Recent Reading

2010-05-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

I need to update my Shelfari bookshelf. Poor Shelfari thinks I've only read 5 books this year. In fact I'm always reading but I tend to only put up the ones that rise to a certain interest level. This week I read two books that I know I'll never forget, and one book that wasn't that great in itself, but which definitely started my creativity flowing.
I hate to admit it but I often avoid books that touch even a little on the Israel-Palestine thing, so while I'd heard of Amos Oz, the Israeli writer, I'd never read any of his novels. But I'm so glad I ran across A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz's memoir of growing up in pre-state of Israel Jerusalem. It focuses on his mother, who loved to tell him stories, and his more skeptical father, and the world of their neighbors, refugees from a now-lost Europe. Oz is a master writer, and he moves back and forth in time, calling up now a girls' school in 1920s Poland, now life on a kibbutz in the 1950s, now 1990s Israel, all the while trying to understand the factors that led to his mother's suicide when he was 12.
Anna Anderson spent most of her life pretending to be Anastasia Romanov (at least if you believe the DNA tests) and her story is told in A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson by Frances Welch. It's an entertaining book -- Anna ended her life as a Crazy Cat Lady, and the man she married to gain US citizenship was nutty as a fruitcake himself. The problem I had with this book was that it just told the story without going any deeper. I'd like to know why Anna fooled so many people for so many years -- why did the people who supported her (and were usually badly treated by her) need to believe she was Anastasia? What did she represent to them and to the moviemakers, etc. who told her story? Even her surburban neighbors late in life believed she was Anastasia. Why? Well, the book doesn't answer these questions but it's such a fascinating story -- identity and imposters and what terms like nobility and royalty are really supposed to signify -- that I've filed it away for the future.
The last book is The City of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, a genuine Nevada writer (famous for The Ox-Bow Incident.) It was written in 1945 and is one of those big, satisfying mid-century novels about growing up (i.e., S-E-X) and, in particular, discovering yourself as an artist and struggling to create something lasting and meaningful. The city of the title is Reno, and the book will make you fall in love with it, and Carmel, and Death Valley and the entire West. It's a little bit like Thomas Wolfe in places, and in others Willa Cather and I can tell it's one of those books I'm going to read over and over.

Thoughts about Research

2010-05-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

A recent post on Elle Strauss' blog got me to thinking about research.
I like things to be right in the world I create. I always imagine someone somewhere will pop up and say, "no, you're wrong about this detail," and then I have terrifying imaginary arguments with them. But sometimes research is about more than detail -- it's about getting the right feeling, and that's tricky.
My MC in How to See the Elephant suffers from (though I never use the term) what are supposed to be asthma attacks. When I revised it I saw that the asthma scenes fell flat: I didn't capture her fear and panic during the attacks, and especially her embarrassment when they happen in public. I felt I couldn't do this until I knew more about asthma. Needless to say, I don't have asthma and don't know anyone who does.
(At this point I am also saying to myself, why did you have to pick asthma? Why not migraines? You can do migraines. But in fact the asthma attacks serve as kind of a symbol of her imprisonment at boarding school; after she runs away she doesn't have them anymore. So I felt they had a function in the plot.)
My first stop was some of the medical textbooks I have access to at work. Here I got a clinical description of the pathology and physiology of asthma, its incidence, ramifications for public health, long-term management, and so on. Really, nothing to help me write a scene describing an attack from the point of view of a asthma sufferer.
So I went to Youtube. Maybe, I reasoned, I could find a video or two of someone having an asthma attack. There were way more than one or two videos, but they turned out to fall into two categories: 1) someone runs up a hill, then coughs a little, or 2) someone in an ER with a mask over their face. Youtube did help me correct a whopping error I'd made with having my MC lie down during her attacks. In fact, it's dangerous for anyone having an asthma attack to lie down -- they are supposed to sit or lean forward. (Immediate re-write there of about 5 scenes.) But other than that there just wasn't enough visible detail in the videos to help me write the scenes. And I also realized that watching a modern-day asthma attack, cut short or helped by an inhaler, wouldn't be the same as an asthma attack in the 19th century. My MC wouldn't have had an inhaler or much in the way of medicine.
We think of an illness as something which is unchangeable over time. A 19th century asthma attack can't be much different from a 20th century one, right? Well, I wasn't so sure. The pathology of asthma -- the swelling of the bronchi -- is the same no matter what, of course. But how a disease is perceived, whom it affects, how the symptoms are described -- these are all subjective. Asthma, for instance, was considered to be a nervous disease, with a psychological origin, well into the 20th century. So what I needed was a natural or social history of asthma, something that would describe asthma as someone in the 19th century saw it.
Well, with a little bit of careful searching, I found, on Google Books, a treatise written in 1882 by a Dr. Henry Salter, who was a pioneer of asthma research. (He was the first to show it could be caused by environmental factors like animal dander.) I learned a lot of interesting information from Dr. Salter's book. For one thing, Dr. Salter didn't seem to think of asthma as a terribly dangerous illness. He doesn't mention any fatalities among his patients and he describes attacks that go on for as long as three days, off and on. Dr. Salter was also convinced that smoking and city air were good for asthma. Like others of his day, he thought it was a nervous illness and he describes it as occuring in definite periods or cycles. Best of all, though, Dr. Salter devotes an entire chapter to describing "the asthma attack." Wikipedia describes the noise an asthma sufferer makes as "whistling." Dr. Salter describes the same noise as "like a mouse squeaking or a kitten mewing."
When I was done with the chapter I felt I had what I needed to re-write the scenes. In fact, I had to avoid the other pitfall of research, which is putting in too much information. The details were odd, but they were 19th century details, and the scenes worked much better for them. And I'm ready to have an imaginary argument with anyone who says otherwise.

Writing anywhere (not a plug for Pei Wei)

2010-05-17T16:30:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my son shooting free throws almost over my head, with my notebook open and my draft, with handwritten corrections, beside it. I'm at work, shut up in a tiny room proctoring two students taking an exam. Ten minutes later I finish my book and and out comes the notebook. Yes, I'm in one of those rare moods when I can write anywhere, in the presence of anybody.

I remember the writing the start of How to See the Elephant particularly well, because I went out to lunch to write on purpose, so that I would actually have that hour instead of having it chipped away by work. I went to Pei Wei, and I became so involved in what I was doing that when the waiter came to take my bowl and said, are you a writer? I jumped about three feet and realized I was late getting back. I understand the waiter's suprise. I don't suppose anyone ever started a novel at Pei Wei, because its the opposite of Starbucks in that no one stays there longer than 20 minutes.

But that experience is really the exception for me. I'm not much of a public writer. But I am a travelling writer, and as long as I have my notebook and feel that tight connection with the text, I'll write anywhere.

The reviser and the revised

2010-05-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

I started revising just one particular part of How to See the Elephant in February and it snowballed to the whole thing but I can definitely say now I'm almost done. This week I re-read it backwards, starting with the last chapter and working back through the book. I'm not sure what gave me the idea to do this but I thought it would give me a new perspective on the separate parts of the book and sort of get me out of the familar groove (you know -- when you've read the paragraphs so many times you don't really see them anymore.) I'm also not sure it was a really helpful idea, on the whole. For one thing, when I finally got to the first chapter, it seemed flat. Of course, reading backwards is a decrescendo so naturally it would be flat, right? (It doesn't seem flat when I read it forwards.) But maybe there is something in that chapter that I'm missing and ought to be looking at.
Anyway, this has left me in a doldrums kind of mood and a serious question about revising. When I rip up paragraphs and passages and write new scenes, am I really making it better? Or does it just seem better when I re-read it because it's new?

Summer reading

2010-05-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

This time of year I usually go to the library and re-check out The Country of the Pointed Fir, by Sarah Orne Jewett. There's really not much to The Country of the Pointed Fir, as a novel. All that happens is a woman writer goes to Maine for the summer and meets some of the local people -- a woman who lives on an island, for instance, and an old man who's traveled on an Arctic expedition. Like a lot of 19th century writing it focuses on the quaint and is long on description. And yet I re-read every year around this time because it gives me a pure, unadulterated feeling of beginning-of-summer: blue water and boats and pines and sunshine. Another set of books I often turn to for the same reason are the Anne of Green Gables books. I know them by heart, and I know what I don't like about them, and yet I re-read them at least twice a year, purely for comfort.
How about you? What qualifies as your comfort reading?

Out of the Past

2010-04-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

The town I live in, Henderson, Nevada, began as a World War II boomtown. A year before Pearl Harbor a British company established itself here to procure magnesium to make bombs to drop on people. The government encouraged people to leave Louisiana and Arkansas to work in the plant, and built them houses and a shopping center. We still have Army, Victory, Atlantic and Pacific streets downtown. Even after the war Henderson continued to be mostly industrial, making, among other things, rocket fuel. (Which is why we have perchlorate in our water.) Now Henderson is mostly suburban. It has a 1950s-style downtown, which is plain rather than quaint. Every now and then it appears to be a small inter-mountain West town, rather than a place that has been conquered by Las Vegas.
Which brings me to The Vat.
Where did it come from? Who left it? Will they ever come back? Is it perhaps the subject of a long-running property dispute/lawsuit so that it continues to flaunt its rusty industrial self opposite our brand-new Target? Am I the only one who ever looks at it, as I drive down Lake Mead, and wonders these things?
I don't know the answers. I just hope they never get rid of it.

The same mesa twice

2010-04-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn't totally ego that led me to leave that last post up so long. I drove to Albuquerque and back and was away for about a week. And on the drive home, I took a slight detour. I saw an exit sign that said Acoma, and I remembered untold years ago, when my future husband and I rented a car and drove around the West, we stopped at Acoma Pueblo the first day. Acoma is "the oldest continually inhabited city in the US" (maybe) -- people having lived on top of the mesa since about 1100. But it wasn't Acoma that has always stuck in my mind from that day. It's the other mesa, the far one in the picture above, the one called the Enchanted Mesa. The story there, which is to a certain extent born out by archeology, is that the Enchanted Mesa was inhabited as well, until a storm washed away the handholds in the rock which enabled people to climb up and down. The people on top of the mesa slowly starved to death, while those left below went to live at Acoma. I supposed it's called the Enchanted Mesa because the spirits of those who died haunted it. Or because, as we might say today, "there's just something weird about it."

I know that's how I felt when we first came over the ridge and saw both mesas below us. I didn't know the story then, but I found my eyes drawn to that mesa as we followed the road down to it. And when we stood on Acoma during the tour I kept looking over at it. It seemed large and alone and bigger, more dominant than Acoma. I don't remember much about Acoma but I've never forgotten the sullen power of that mesa, sitting on the skyline.
So, on the way home from Albuquerque, I left the interstate and drove, bewildered, across the high desert, hoping I could find my way back, until I came to the same ridge, and saw the two mesas rising from the valley floor.
It wasn't quite the same. I guess in years of living out West I have seen a lot of mesas and they no longer seem as dramatic as they once did. You can't step in the same river twice and you can't see a mesa with the same eyes that you saw it years ago. If there was no longer a sense of mystery, of haunted power, about the way it stood alone in the desert, there was now unity and peace. Once the mesa had loomed on the horizon. Now it was small and part of the landscape.

The beginning...

2010-04-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

I'm participating in Kelly's (of Kelly's Compositions) first page blogfest. Herewith the first 24 (and a half) lines of The Poison Hill. Run over and take a look at the others as well.

There had never been a time, after Gertrude had known David, when she had not believed that she would marry him someday. He had first appeared in the driveway in 1919, in that jittery spring after the war: an intense, upright boy who even in high school still tied up his books with a cord, who waited for her brother Louis at 7 a.m., rain, snow or fog, refusing all enticements into the kitchen. Nah, I’ll wait out here. Nah, I’m OK, Mrs. Leskow. He had called their housekeeper, Alida, Mrs. Leskow, and he repeated the gaffe almost daily, never acknowledging in any serious way that he had made a mistake long after he must have realized it.

That was the year that a chant, rhyming “Leskow” with “presto!” was raised whenever Louis crossed the high school campus, the year of his debating win streak, the year the Juniors ran the Junior-Senior Banquet (as they called it) as a Russian Revolution party and served caviar and borscht.

It was the year, too, that Louis brought home “Crazy Blues” and wound up the Victrola until the twining blues, rambling like a vine, climbed out and Gertrude found him dancing a solo grizzly bear on the Persian carpet, arms squeezed around himself, hopping from side to side.

No one else could understand their music. That murky wailing, those screeching horns! Their parents thought it was awful. And yet it was life; it was happiness; it was truth and justice and passion and everything else that had been locked up in the closet and lost. Thereafter Gertrude sat in front of the Victrola and wound it up over and over, shivering happily as the distant voice began again:
I can’t sleep at night, I can’t eat a bite…
’Cause the man I love, he don’t treat me right…

Even David, normally so scornful of everything, had grabbed her as he listened to it, and stepped her backward across the room in a kind of tango and dipped her far, far back until she shrieked.

Good Friday

2010-04-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Walking back from the dentist she had looked at the trees, just coming out, and wondered how many springs people had been looking at trees come out and suddenly the world seemed extremely young, a fingernail’s edge of growth. Spring was gray and unstable. It was miracles and tragedies – terrible events, anyway, that could never happen in summer and winter.
She left the office at noon. In the streets, along scaffolding around eternal construction, were posters for clubs, perfume, designers. Once, for a moment only, she had seen the world through the eyes of a saint, seen vanity in every single human desire – but only for a moment. No one could think that way all the time. The streets were gray, but there was color in the posters, and in the flame-colored tulips outside the Korean delis.
Church bells were marking noon. Some people climbed the steps; others looked up, caught, remembering the date. Beggars called out good wishes. Brightness in the air, and darkness in the church, and the choir triumphant now after many rehearsals, Latin on one side of the program, English on the other. The priest, high in his pulpit, preaching to strangers. The choir again. Soon the bells for one o’clock. No one would care if she came back late.
Now time was compressed again, and the world newly saved. Bells, and swoops of pigeons, and the entire city waiting for something as each toll rang. No gesture was needed, no words, nothing dramatic to bring out somberness in a civilization built on dazzle – it was already there, in the restless streets and the cries, in the pigeons flying as they might have flown up when the veil of the Temple was torn. The third hour began. People left, others entered. A new priest, coming forward to take up his assigned reading. The choir low and somber now. The last words spoken, the last note released. Left in silence, to go back out into the streets, still gray, still waiting, and the spring, still unsettled, still dangerous.
On the way back to the office she bought the flame-colored tulips.

Something to think about

2010-03-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's the switch to daylight savings time but I've been feeling a joy-of-spring feeling lately, a feeling of energy and internal happiness. I'm back in love with writing and the fact that I have a crazy amount of real-world work just makes me laugh. Also, for the past week I've been re-reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, something I do every couple of years or when I lack inspiration. It's fascinating to follow the up and down progress as she finds her form and then is halted by everyday interruptions (including having T.S. Eliot as a houseguest -- which would intimidate anyone!)

So I found this one little nugget which I mean to remember when I can't write:

"The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalized, very, very concentrated..."

OK, long walks. I can do that. (Even though I don't have a country house.)
"The reading of..." well, something to get the mind moving. (I have a feeling my reading is far trashier than Virginia Woolf's "good literature.")
Finally, get out of life. Not out into life...out of life, away from interruptions and demands. Give yourself space to think.
Fortunately right now I don't need this advice. I'm off to make hay while the sun shines.

Hark, hark

2010-03-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

I believe that there was an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which had writer Murray Slaughter beginning his long-planned novel with the words, "Somewhere, a dog was barking." I guess every writer has what are for them evocative sounds -- voices in another room, a train whistle, the lapping of water. With me, for reasons that remain obscure, one of those sounds is dogs barking. I've been sitting here in the spring evening -- there's daylight after dinner now -- when my thoughts were interrupted by barking in the distance. A block away, a mile away, who knows? It struck me as the sound of life, somewhere out there -- the opposite of isolation -- a sound of striving, of longing, of a need to talk to someone. It reminded me of the book 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs of England exchange news at the "Twilight Barking" every evening. I always loved that idea -- of a vast communication over distance and space, dogs with their own world of gossip to share. Well, who knows why dogs bark? As the light goes I think I could lie here and listen to them, and all the other noises of the world, a long, long time.

The last word

2010-03-08T15:50:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times obituary section for March 8, 2010:
1. Ruth Kligman. Sole survivor of the car accident which killed Jackson Pollock and muse to numerous artists of the 50s and 60s. Lived in Ibiza late in life. Married a couple of times, no children. "Art is my life, that's my motto."
2. Henri Salmide. Nazi officer who was ordered to blow up the port of Bordeaux, France in 1944. Didn't do it, saving the lives of at least 3,500 people. Considered a traitor in Germany after the war, married a Frenchwoman and lived in complete obscurity, partly because the Resistance tried to take credit for his actions.
3. Patricia Travers. Child prodigy violinist of the 1930s. Hailed as having a great future, instead gave up violin entirely. Never married. Managed a condo in NJ. In later years occasionally played violin for her mother.
4. Mark Linkous. Alternative/country musician who led (0r was known as) Sparklehorse. In spite of recent career progress, went into an alley in Knoxville over the weekend and shot himself in the heart.
Four great stories (almost novels in themselves) and four great characters. I am always amazed by how beautiful, mysterious and ironic individual lives are.

Bare hands

2010-02-26T21:01:00.001-08:00

One of the things that goes unrealized by people who come to Las Vegas from back East is that if you want stuff to live, you have to plant it before April. If you don't, it won't have a strong enough root system to stand the summer. So while the rest of country is still covered in snow, I generally spend the last week of February outside, digging in the dirt, planting, fertilizing, replacing mulch and gravel and pulling up weeds left by the winter rains.* This year I've planted two new species of penstemons, along with scrophularia and Jupiter's beard -- all low-water native plants that like the sun.
I used to plan my flowerbed. One year I put lavender with artemesia, thinking that the purple flowers and gray-green leaves would look nice together. The lavender didn't thrive and the artemesia did -- in fact, the artemesia took over the bed and I've never had the energy to root it up. (I like to think that now I can make my own absinthe, should I choose.) So, what with unusual seeds that just happened to thrive and impulse buys at the nursery, my flowerbed is the same every year -- a total work in progress, never done, never perfect. I always have a new plant that I think is going to cover all my bare spots. Last year it was globe mallow, another low-water plant, which ran wild and then expired, leaving a weedy skeleton to loom over the bed most of the summer. Just today I discovered a guest -- I don't think it's something I planted but it's not a weed and where it came from I can't tell. I'll just have to wait and see.
I'd hate to have a garden that was so perfect I didn't need to work in it.

*You all can quit envying me in May, when it's too hot to go outside.

Take Two

2010-02-23T11:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I sat down and discovered 1) a set of revisions that I thought had been saved last week hadn't been saved at all, and 2) moving from a thumb drive to one of my home computers I had copied an unrevised section back over a revised section, so that was gone as well. Neither section was very long, and I could remember some of the changes I had made, but I had done those revisions in a sort of concentrated fury which I knew I couldn't recapture.

So I didn't get much done yesterday. Mostly I just berated myself. I've never lost anything I've written before. I now feel completely disconnected from the manuscript.

I couldn't even enjoy the ice dancing last night. (Though after the Russian "Aborigines" the night before I think I need to question my interest in this so-called sport.)

Well, life marches on. And I've just remembered an incident from a bio of Peggy Lee I read recently. When they were recording "Is That All There Is?' she went through something like 30 takes, trying to get it right. And on the very last take, when she finally nailed it, it turned out the sound engineer hadn't been recording. So they had to do it one more time. And that was the take that got released.

Whoops! blogfest

2010-02-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Laurel for sponsoring the Whoops! blogfest. Go to her blog to read the others!

Please keep a couple of things in mind.
1) This is a real WIP, very new.
2) It part of the opening scene, so it may change or go away altogether.
3) This happened to me all the time in school...although never with Rosemary's Baby.

Of course Guy doesn’t believe Rosemary when she tells him there’s a coven of witches next door. He’s one of them! Rosemary’s such an idiot.
This reflection is interrupted by an awareness of a kind of silence around me. A waiting silence. Rosemary’s Baby is ripped from my hand, without Mrs. Tate even breaking stride. Then her desk drawer is open and the black cover of the book is disappearing inside.
“Mrs. Tate!”
The class is laughing hysterically.
“Mrs. Tate!”
“If you want it back, Joanie, you can ask at the end of the semester.”
“But it’s a library book!”
“That is your problem. My problem is to instruct you peons in the multiplication of decimals. If I accomplish nothing else in my brief time on this planet…”
And so on. Mrs. Tate really should have been a drama teacher.
In front of me Dan Smiley has fallen halfway out his seat with the effort of laughing at me. He sits up and, pushing his fingers up under his glasses, wipes his eyes.
“Man, that was priceless,” he says. “Priceless.”

Questions...

2010-02-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

I need some advice.
I've spent the past six weeks waiting while an agent who requested "exclusivity" looked at pages from How to See the Elephant. Last week, that agent rejected it, so I'm going to start sending it out again. Here's the thing, though. I've recently revised one section of it, cutting about 3,000 words and streamlining the narrative. It was not an overall revision of the ms, just one focused on that particular section, based on feedback I had gotten about it. Now, back in October another agent told me that she would be interested in seeing HTSE again if I ever did any revisions of it. So the question is -- does it make more sense to send a revised HTSE to the previous agent, since she showed interest in it? Or should I start afresh, with agents I haven't sent it to? Or can I do both?
Second question. Another recent rejection said they would be interested in any other projects I might have. Usually I don't take this very seriously but as it happens I do have my former WIP, The Poison Hill, complete. I really hadn't intended to start submitting it, however. I think How to See the Elephant is much more "sellable" -- the basic concept is simpler ("girl runs away and becomes a nurse in the Civil War") and it fits into a familiar genre. And I really don't want to end up with two agents interested in two different projects (ha -- I should be so lucky!) because that would be a personal nightmare. Decision making is NOT my strong suit. I'd prefer to just push HTSE. But am I losing an opportunity here? Should I just be sending everything out, at the first sign of interest?
I've been going around and around with this for the past couple of days. Any advice?

Love at First Sight

2010-02-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

I didn't get in on the Kissing/No Kissing blogfests, but I'm pretty excited about Love at First Sight. This is from my (no-longer IP) WIP, The Poison Hill, a YA novel set in the 1920s. Gertrude, the heroine, has gone with her mother to a health resort in Montana, where she meets Frances... Enjoy it, and Happy Valentine's Day!

"This is not how I meant to start. I meant to start with when I arrived. For some reason everything I wrote in my diary is…well, I wouldn’t say not true, but sort of unimportant. There were some things I couldn’t write down for fear of other people reading them and then that made other things too complicated to relate and soon there was nothing to write but unimportant stuff. (I wonder if all diaries are like that?) Still, I thought I had included some of the important things. I didn’t remember I’d written so much just about the train ride. And a few things I wrote were not exactly what happened. For instance, I wrote that I talked to Frances at the hot springs pool, but actually I was just sitting on the edge, with my legs in – the water was so hot and sort of nasty-smelling – and she was drifting around on her back on the other side. Then she turned over and swam towards the ladder like she was going to get out. I tried to think of something to say. I was still thinking when, as she climbed up the ladder, she pointed at the leg of my bathing suit and said:

“You’ve got a thread loose.”

And that was all, except I went back to my room and cut the thread off with Mother’s nail scissors.

Except it wasn’t all. It was a lot, actually. She had looked at me and spoken to me and I was so irritated at myself for wearing an old bathing suit like that and at the same time not really upset because she could have just walked right by me without saying anything, and she didn’t. It wasn’t like she said the thing about the thread to be mean. I didn’t feel that at all. There was something about her tone, as if she were calling out to me and laughing at the same time, so I didn’t take it amiss as I might have with another girl.

But of course when I sat down to write about it I couldn't put all that down. It wasn't there enough to write down. I couldn't write down either that I wanted to make her notice me that first night at dinner. I never could have, because it wouldn't have sounded right. But I did want to, even though I didn’t know then that she was going to be a person of importance to me.

But no, I can’t write that truthfully. I did know it. It was like a trumpet blast, when she looked at me at dinner. Windows must have shattered for miles around. And all around us people went on talking about duck blinds.

For days and days after that there was no thinking about anything. I was happy all the time. When I took the elevator past Floor 2 I would say to myself that’s her floor and when I walked in that sun-stunted rose garden, all brown leaves and withered stock, I would say she’s walked here.

No, that’s wrong. It’s soppy. I was never soppy.

It wasn’t a bit like what Louis is, either. There was absolutely nothing sick about it. I mean, you would only have to look at Frances to see how feminine she is. And all the men at the Paradise were crazy for her. Mr. Lind, the man with the false leg, who was a gas case from the war, never took his eyes off her and used to hobble up to talk to her in the halls.

No, it was not like Louis at all. It was something else entirely."

Rain and Ruin

2010-02-11T14:05:00.001-08:00

I know I haven't been here much lately. Sometimes things get very busy at work and I just can't seem to get clear of it. It's been raining a lot here in Vegas, which is good when you are staying in bed and reading Jane Eyre again but bad when it makes you want to eat lots of toast. Somehow rain and toast seem to go together for me.
Meanwhile I noticed this week that the trees are budding. My tulips are coming up in their pots on the porch, and the sweet peas rambling, although I'd prefer them to climb the trellis above them instead.
Oh, and I just got the most annoying kind of rejection letter -- not even any useful feedback, just "we didn't connect with it."
!!!
So I'm getting my agent notebook out again.
My officemate just said, apropos of something else, "well, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye." So I'll take that as my philosophy for the day.

I will be posting for the Love at First Sight blogfest on Sunday however!

Hero Worship II: The Sylph

2010-02-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Lizzie Siddal (or is it Siddall?) was a different kettle of fish altogether. In the first place, even more obscure than Anne Boleyn. No one’s heard of her except art majors who’ve strayed down the same byways I have. And her life was pathetic. Anne Boleyn at least lived well and died bravely. You can dress Lizzie Siddal up all you like but she was still a drug addict who killed herself. And yet I admired her. I saw her as a role model. What was I thinking?
Perhaps part of it was the difference been childhood and adolescence. As a child I fixated on a dynamic heroine who did things her way. As a teenager I admired a passive, insubstantial figure who turned her back on life when it became too difficult for her. Pretty much textbook, I guess.
Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) started out as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in time began living with Rossetti, though they put off marriage until 1860. The reasons for this un-Victorian arrangement seem to have been 1) economic (Rossetti was poor), 2) social (Lizzie was from a lower class) and 3) true love never running smooth (they broke up for more than a year.) Rossetti encouraged her to paint, as did John Ruskin, but Lizzie was sickly, given to going to spa cures and killing her pains with laudanum. She was, however, Rossetti’s primary muse, painted over and over in small, intricate, mysterious pictures. (The picture above is one of the early ones. There was a period in his life when he did little but sketch her.) In 1861 they had a stillborn child; thereafter she behaved “erratically” and became reclusive. In February 1862 Rossetti came home to find her dying of an overdose.*
In terms of actual facts, not a lot is known about Lizzie’s life. Only a couple of her letters survive. Victorian reticence covered her during Rossetti’s lifetime. By the end of the 19th century people had begun to spin mythologies about what they needed her to be: a frail muse, an emotional vampire, and, later, an anorexic victim of the patriarchy and Victorian hypocrisy. With her apparent beauty and not-so-apparent talent, her obscurity, her mysterious illnesses and her early death, she was born to be fictionalized. I can’t isolate now quite why I found this combination so admirable, but perhaps this was my first experience with pure storytelling, with floating away from reality into a world of embroidered highs and lows, of romance and drama.

*After this, things turned very weird: Rossetti buried his unpublished poetry with her, then, seven years later, decided he really needed those poems back and had her dug up so he could retrieve them. Then he had a mental breakdown and became an alcoholic and drug addict as well.

Hero Worship I: The Lady

2010-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:00

Everybody needs a hero(ine) but why, as a child, mine should have been Anne Boleyn, is something I’ve never quite sorted out. I assume the original interest came from a long-forgotten historical novel. Certainly it was fed by them, and by “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” on Masterpiece Theatre. And yet, I’m not entirely convinced by this explanation, mainly because the Anne Boleyn that so heavily occupied my thoughts when I was ten years old was not the ready-made villainess that generally crops up in fictional accounts of the Tudors. Historical novelists love to go to town with Anne, loading her with every negative feminine characteristic in the book: shallowness, immorality, deviousness, bigotry, cruelty, and so on, at least until the end of the book, when they generally admit she was innocent of adultery and treason and write a scene in which she goes to her death on the scaffold bravely. My Anne Boleyn – the Anne Boleyn I created in my head – was none of these things. She was misunderstood. And I think that this idea – that she struggled, and that I had to struggle, to clear her name – was the crux of the matter for me. No doubt some of her wildness appealed to me and no doubt I saw her as someone immensely powerful, someone who could be my defender. But I could also defend her – and I frequently did, mostly to people who couldn’t have cared less. (Although I believe my classmates did enjoy hearing that after your head was cut off your body could continue to move.)
I’ve long since passed beyond being interested in Anne Boleyn and yet I still shy away from any book that seems to be “against” her. (Take that, Alison Weir! Take that, Philippa Gregory!) And I still want to lecture people on what an unusual figure she was for a 16th century female and how the main contemporary record of her life was written by the Spanish ambassador, so naturally it’s biased, and… And sometimes, looking back on the whole thing, I’m kind of intrigued that somehow out of the welter of historical women I picked such a weird one.
Anyone else out there have an unusual childhood hero?

The Rainy Season

2010-01-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

The week before:
Did you hear? It's going to rain every day next week.
They said we might get four inches.
I don't believe it. It'll probably rain for half an hour and we'll get a tenth of an inch.

Day one:
It's raining.
Is it?
[The entire office assembles to look out the front window.] I hope it rains a lot. We can use it.
I love the rain.
So do I -- I love cuddling up under a blanket and hearing it on the roof.
Wow, it's really coming down now.
I hope it keeps up.
[an hour later, when someone comes in from outside] Is it still raining?

Days two- four:
Oh man, the roof's leaking.
Sorry I'm late -- 215 was flooded.
I hate the rain.
This is why I left Cleveland/Minnesota/England.
I wanted to stop by Walgreen's after work but I guess I won't since it's raining.
Did you see that accident? No one here knows how to drive in the rain.
We can use it, that's for sure.
It's freeeeeeeeeezing! I had to wear my winter coat!
Does anyone have an umbrella?
I don't know know if I'm going to be able to make it to Lake Las Vegas/Summerlin/Boulder City. The roads might be closed.
I hate the rain.

Day five, white clouds and bits of blue sky.
Did you see all the snow on the mountains? Aren't they gorgeous? Hey, I hear its going to be in the 70s next week.

Reflections on a disaster

2010-01-14T18:28:00.000-08:00

One of the books I read this past year was A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit. In this book, Solnit looks at major disasters, both man made (like the Blitz) and natural, starting with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Her argument is that, contrary to government and popular expectations, during disasters people largely display benevolent behavior. They rush to rescue each other and often band together to provide food, shelter and other help to complete strangers. Far from taking advantage of disorder to indulge in lawless behavior, she writes, people try to re-create it, working together in ad-hoc communities. Though the book is a little repetitive and choppy, her evidence is persuasive and it gives me a little hope in the wake of Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti. The terrible irony of the earthquake there is that in previous natural disasters (like hurricanes) it was the poor who were mainly affected while the government and upper classes marched on indifferently. Now the government is gone and the poor are in the streets. I can't imagine what the future holds for Haiti, but Solnits uses the Mexico City earthquake to show how disasters sometimes bring about real social change. Perhaps the lessons learned in the rubble of Port Au Prince can be used to help Haiti turn a corner.
When you write historical fiction you get used to looking at difficult times in human history and the complexities of human behavior, and partly you try to find some hope in such situations.
In the meantime, I'm terribly proud of my country for taking charge of the rescue efforts. It's good to see people respond so unselfishly.

My new blog

2010-01-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

Since last year I've been collecting YA novels of a different era -- mass market teenage girls' books from the late 50s/early 60s. I've started a new blog, The Paris Hat, to take a light-hearted look at some of the ones I have. Most of them are fun to read, and quite often they have something kind of unexpected to them. Who would think that a popular teen author would write a book about machine politics in a small town? Or that a date with the town's handsomest boy would lead to a spree of pyromania? Or that the self-esteem raising phrase "we're all winners" was actually in use in 1961?
Check it out if you're interested. I will probably update it once a week or so. (I wrote some of these posts in draft versions, and now Blogger is using the draft dates, from last week, so the dating might be a little screwy.)

Judge not...

2010-01-12T16:23:00.000-08:00

As part of my job I'm part of a team that decides on admissions to the medical school I work at. Once every couple of weeks I sit on the other side of a desk from a kid in a suit, asking him or her questions and trying to get inside his or her head, while I make what is (from his/her point of view) the most important decision of my life.

I find this experience informative for the process of querying and submitting - a taste of what it's like to be on the other side of the desk, as it were. I've learned a couple of things from it:

1. Rejection isn't personal. Some of the people we reject will get into other medical schools. They just weren't the right fit for us. Maybe they don't know much about our programs and our situation, or maybe they just don't seem very interested. I'm sure we sometimes let good ones get away. It happens.

2. Rejection isn't easy. I often feel a great split between my compassion for a candidate with a compelling story and my better judgement, which says that they do not have the academic background or maturity to make it through medical school. This decision, directly and indirectly, affects many lives, including those of future patients. It's often a relief to turn to the other person on my team and the admissions committee and let them bear some of the burden.

3. The best thing a candidate can do is give me a reason to want him/her to succeed. It can be a story, an interest, a goal, but I have to see a reason to say, "Wow, this person will be a great doctor."

Interestingly enough, I think this last reason really connects to writing. Long ago, I went through a phase in querying when my queries were not very long and were couched in formal language. I liked this approach because I thought it was "professional." "They'll see I mean business," I used to think, "I don't waste their time with fluffy stuff." I know now why this approach didn't work. A candidate who is formal and polite and nothing else comes across as uncommitted -- someone just putting up a front but who probably doesn't really want to be a doctor. (It may seem odd, but we do actually get people who apply to med school because they're not really sure what they want to do with their lives, or because they want to please their families.) Likewise I think with a query you must sort of give the agent a reason to want to see your book or want to see it succeed. The trick is to do this without sounding like a danger to yourself and others, of course.

I can never quite get out of my mind that somewhere someone is looking at my dreams and judging them and I only hope that they weigh their decisions as carefully as I weigh mine.

D for Done

2010-01-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

The WIP is no longer IP. No longer W, either. A year ago I was about 5 chapters into a nice romp through the first draft. So that's not so bad. I think its going to be called The Poison Hill. Some details:
Setting: St. Paul, MN. Summer 1924
Protagonist: Gertrude Leskow, 18
The Nutshell: Gertrude falls in love with another girl, breaks her engagement and begins to take charge of her life.
Actually, a large part of the book fell into place when I encountered Andrew Lang's Pink Fairy Book (and all the other subsequent Fairy Books) in my library. I kept reading the same story over and over -- variously called "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," "The Hoodie Crow," "The Brown Bear of Norway," and so on. It's the story of a girl who marries an animal and discovers he is a man under a spell; she betrays his secret and he leaves her but she wins him back, often by traveling long distances and undergoing trials. Several things about this appealed to me, but I really felt that I could use both the theme and structure in a novel. I'll never write fantasy -- I just don't have that kind of mind -- but I liked the idea of incorporating mythology this way. And when I found, in the course of my research, a quote from G.K. Chesterton, to the effect that all fairy tales are spiritual exercises, I felt I was on a good track. As I've tried to express it in Chapter 1:

All her life she had believed in fairy tales – in books. Sometimes in real life certain events – a shabby man speaking to her on the streetcar – seemed almost to imitate the beginning of such stories, but if it never went any further she did not mourn, for the books were enough.
Even so, she should have learned something. Not just that magic might be hidden in a walnut; that one must be kind to dwarves; that the cat you freed from a trap on page 2 would do you a good turn on page 4. No, the lessons were meant to be much deeper than that. Heroines must be passionate about the truth, for instance. They must grab it with both hands and hold on in spite of torments and temptations; they must seek it far away, even go into exile. And if they must humble themselves in the service of this truth, and perform some terrible, impossible task to free someone, humble themselves they would, and then, with horseshoes on their hands and feet, climb the hill of poison, utterly alone.
But though she knew all this, she did not believe in it beyond the page itself, and so everything she would need to know lay unheeded on her bookshelves.

How to See the Elephant - Part IV

2010-01-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

Seeking her father, Thetis slips past the guard and enters the camp.

I went swiftly through an area of darkened tents. I was leery of everyone I saw, pausing and waiting and moving on only when I thought there was no-one about. I still had the gun but I knew it would make no difference now. I walked through the labyrinth of tents and stumbled down a hill into a creek and up out of it again, falling over someone’s dinner mess and scattering metal utensils in the dark. And the whole time words, terrible words, from a part of the Bible I had read in secret and never understood: We have a little sister and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver, and if she be a door, we will enclose her… I am a wall, and my breasts like towers, then it was that I found favor in his eyes… My face was wet, and I had not even known I was crying. And then I came out on a road again, and there was a horrible smell and I thought I must be near the latrines, but there was something else in the smell: not just latrines but a rotten smell, like the dead fish in the river, and something acrid and chemical. If there was a hospital in the camp, this was it. I saw a large tent, a marquee-like structure, with flaps pulled back, and a lantern at the door. I moved forward until I could peer inside. Two women sat around a packing crate with an oil lamp on it. One was reading aloud; the other, listening, held a handkerchief to her nose. As I watched, the one reading paused and passed the book to her companion. She took her handkerchief away and began reading, while the first lady sank back in her chair and applied her own handkerchief to her nose gratefully. On the other side of the tent was a group of three or four men. I could not see well enough to tell what they were doing, but they seemed ambulatory. I saw a pair of crutches leaning against a makeshift wall of packing crates.
I hesitated a moment before I went in. I licked my palm like a cat and smoothed my hair. I shook my skirts out and brushed at my clothes. I dried my face completely. The hospital smell made me think of the last days at home, of the filth of the sheets and the desperation with which we washed and even burned them (our second-best set, but by that time no-one cared), and of my mother, who had never paused in any activity, never asked for any kind of mercy or reprieve, vanquished, bone-thin, her face blue, barely able to turn over in bed.
I stepped forward steadily, crunching over gravel and dried grass. I don’t remember what I said to the two ladies. I may have tried to walk past them entirely. I remember being held by the arms. But it did not matter, because one of the men stood up and even with his hair so much longer and his beard so much grayer, even with the crutch, I knew who it was, though my brain did not want to recognize him. But I did not cry. I let him put his arms around me and pat my back and I leaned my head against his chest and I heard him ask, Where did you come from? and How? and say, My God, Thetis! I let everybody talk, and said nothing. There was not point in thinking about any of it. It was all over and done with.
And though they made me sit down and brought me soup and found me a place to sleep, I thanked no one, and when my father tried to look me in the eye I turned my head away.

Happy New Year - Now Get to Work!

2010-01-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

Most writers hate synopsizing. There’s a meat-grinder aspect to the process of cutting your novel down to its essentials and yet not losing the spirit of the thing. (Constructing a synopsis also has a tendency to reveal the smallest structure flaw or missing character motivation in your novel – which is always discouraging if you think you’re done writing it.) Writing/publishing blogs and guides suggest a synopsis should be no more than 2 pages and should only refer to the 3-4 most important characters by name. As soon as you sit down that seems impossible. But I can't leave out the part about the car accident...and then there's the old lady -- she's an important character... And before you know it you have 4 pages of explanation rather than synopsis and your prized work sounds like the trashiest trash since Harold Robbins. (Wow, that reference really dates me.)
Having said all this, I have found a method of synopsizing which works for me and I thought I would share it. I use an Excel spreadsheet but you could do it longhand as well.
The first column I make is called “What Happens.” Under it, for each chapter, I note only the biggest event(s). I keep this very short – not even full sentences. For Part 3 of How to See the Elephant, the entire “What Happens” column reads:

T. crosses PA, OH with Sheba. Changes mind about S. Convinces S. to go on.

Part 3 is actually fairly long and has quite a bit of adventure. But that’s not what I’m trying to set down at this point. I’m trying to focus on the most important thing in Part 3, the event that underlies all the drama – and that’s the changing relationship between Thetis and Sheba.
The next column is “Drama.” Here I number the particular events and points of conflict in the chapter – basically what keeps the reader interested. For Part 3 I broke this down to:

1. T. decides to take S. for selfish reasons.
2. Conflict at Altoona and on train.
3. T. decides to abandon S.
4. Convent. S. defends self. T. dislikes but begins to respect.
5. Rejected. Peddler, Josiah, Cincinnati
6. Disappointment in C. S. breakdown. George. T. convinces S. to go on.
7. Boat to Louisville.

This pegs out for me the most important events, but even so it’s probably a little more detailed than it should be. That’s OK – I’ll make the decision on what to include/not include when I do the final column. Now, this is where it can get tricky. You may not use all the points you just listed. Likewise, you may want to introduce some introductory information. You may rewrite it a couple of times, moving stuff in and out. But keep it short and simple and stick to what you've outlined. When I come to actually write the sentences, I usually attach each one (or part of one) to the pertinent conflict point in the previous column. The final column for Part 3 is below. I've put the points from the previous column in brackets. Notice that I didn't end up using 1 and 2. I decided that neither was important enough to go in.

“The two girls flee from Delaware to Ohio by train and on foot. Thetis wants to find her father, while Sheba, who has no experience of the world, simply wants to get away from Miss Veda. Sheba attracts attention everywhere for refusal to be treated differently from Thetis. Thetis, who finds Sheba spoiled and insufferable, decides to abandon her as soon as she decently can. [3] Travelling across Ohio over four days the two girls sleep out in the open, ride with a peddler, outrage the laws of hospitality and are nearly shot for chicken thieves. [4-5] A tense partnership emerges, with Thetis respecting Sheba while still not liking her. [4] In Cincinnati, where Thetis had hoped to get help, no riverboats are running and Louisville is rumored to be under Confederate attack. Sheba breaks down but Thetis persuades her the only thing she can do now is to go on. [6] The two girls find a boatman to take them downriver to Louisville, which is under military rule. [7]”

The above lines condense 21, 686 words and balance the underlying theme of the chapter with the actual events. Even so, I will rewrite it as it goes into the final document, condensing some of the longer sentences and redundancies and giving it a narrative flow. Ultimately, using this method, the synopsis for How to See the Elephant was under two pages and mentioned only the 4 most important characters.
I think the key here is keeping an eye on the bigger theme of the novel (in this case, what the two girls learn from each other) while not leaving out the smaller events (the ups and downs of the journey) which hold the reader’s attention. This method helps me find that balance. I thought I’d share it in case it helps somebody else.

How to See The Elephant -- Part IV

2010-01-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

Following a line of Army wagons with wounded soldiers, Thetis finds a camp on the outskirts of Louisville.

From the top of the hill, as I sat down to rest, I saw a small city, seemingly, with lamps and lights spread for hundreds of yards, and the glimmer of tents, their sides stirring in the breeze, and the sound – that mixture of roaring, singing and snoring – of men in camp, that I would come to know so well in the future.
When I had regained my breath, and found my way to the gate of the camp, I saw a sentry. Now, I had a feeling, it would begin all over again – the trek from captain to major to general, the same refusal to commit to any action, the same doubts and dissuasion – and then back to Louisville, or across the river. I had to get by him. He was no young fellow who might be bamboozled, either. He was crooked and ancient, with a sparse beard made up for by over-sufficient quantities of nose and ear hair.
“I’m going to the camp hospital,” I said, “I have supplies for my father.”
Of course I had nothing with me, except the gun, which I tucked unsteadily into the band of my skirt, far enough back to be out of sight.
He looked me up and down. “Camp hospital!”
“Yes, sir. My father’s in the 95th Ohio.”
“No 95th Ohio here.”
I took a deep breath, then reached up and tried to pull out my hair so it would flutter in the breeze. I bunched it over my shoulders, and then I pulled up my skirt on one side, just enough that you could see to the knee, and stood with my leg thrust out, turning it back and forth in the lantern light. I had put my stockings back on, in anticipation of arrival in Louisville.
“See that?”
“Hmm,” he said, staring at my leg as if it were some sort of curious animal that might have to be killed.
“Do you see that, sir?”
“I see it.”
“Well, what do you think?” I let the skirt drop and put my hands on my hips. “I’m one of Miss Tamara’s girls. General Gillmore—” I had heard this name in one of the hotels we passed through “—requested our presence, sir, at a small entertainment he is hosting for his officers. Do you understand me?” I felt I could not afford to let him pause and think through anything. I showed my leg again.
“Do you think the general will like me, sir?”
It sounds almost harmless: a lark, a high-spirited joke, a wiggling of the shoulders and a saucy wink to get me into the camp. It wasn’t. I felt terrible. I knew that my mother, if she had ever watched over me from heaven, would surely abandon me now. It was not a case of enduring something for the sake of something better. It was a willful choice I had made. I could feel a cold shame, like the reverse of a blush, creeping from my knees to my head; my innards, constricting, doubling upon themselves, rising; my head light and my own voice unfamiliar in my ears. I stood without trembling only by will – a will I’d not had enough of when it might truly have helped me.
I turned my head and leaned forward and let my hair swing out, and he touched it, first clumsily, and then playfully he wrapped it around his finger and it pulled a little and finally I laughed, a high false sound that I had not known I was capable of making, and said:
“Now, now, sir.”

In Which I Overcome Certain Prejudices

2009-12-29T14:21:00.000-08:00

I’m always fascinated by the narrow line between discovering a great writer and passing him/her up with an “ehh, maybe not,” and a shrug of the shoulders.
When I was a teenager reading my way through the shelves of the Lexington library I used to run across the novels of Richard Brautigan regularly. They all had weird titles and when I looked at the inside flap there was always a complete failure by the publisher’s copy to describe or convey what in any way they novel was about. Since I liked to know what a book was about before I read it (call me spoiled), I left Richard Brautigan alone. And so his name vanished in my mind behind hundreds of other writers I did or didn’t read, and would have stayed there for good if I was not trying to recall recently what sort of books were peculiar to the 1970s. I looked to see if Brautigan was still a native of my local library (answer – sort of) and then I went to a bookstore and got 3 of his works (Trout Fishing In America, The Pill Vs. the Springhill Mining Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar) in one volume.
Brautigan’s life can be summed up in a very short narrative. Grew up poor in the Pacific Northwest. Bummed around most of his life. Drank. Went through a lot of women. Wrote short, obscure sort-of novels that even a Martian would recognize as being quintessential 1960s. Drank some more. Killed himself. His writings are full of parody and irony. His saving grace may be that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he wasn’t in love with the sound of his own voice. His sentences are spare and focused and his images are memorable. Fantasy, magical realism and pop culture are balanced by trout fishing, camping in the hills and memories of a hardscrabble childhood. In fact, the Brautigan I’ve found in these works probably not so much a quintessentially 60s writer as a quintessentially Western writer – one far less stuck-up than Wallace Stegner. He creates a modern mythology for his land – Lewis and Clark coexisting in time with a boy watching a Deanna Durbin movie in Great Falls, Montana; a man going to a junkyard and buying a used trout stream; a backwoods outhouse mourning the man who built it.
Sometimes a writer’s reputation won’t rise until several decades after his death. I’m not sure that this will happen to Brautigan – the 60s seem increasingly to be cast as an embarrassing decade, not to be taken seriously – but if his ever does it will be because he is understood as a great modern Western writer, and not merely as someone whose work has to be explained in the context of his times.

How to See the Elephant - Part IV

2009-12-29T14:19:00.000-08:00

Thetis finds a boatman willing to take her and Sheba downriver. They are accompanied by Mrs. Ayers, who has decided to volunteer as a nurse. Louisville is under military occupation and they are arrested by a military patrol and held at a hotel while a decision is made about what to do with them.

The sun had long since set and the hours slipped by. We had a plate of dinner in one of the hotels, served by a waiter who leaned against the wall and picked his teeth, watching us sternly. We were supposed to be seen, in a few hours, by another general. From time to time soldiers walked through the lobby, making their way to the bar with steady footsteps, only to stagger back a little while later. Once we heard gunshots in the street outside, followed by a window going up and someone calling down the wrath of heaven on the next person who made any noise. The soldiers in the bar began to improvise verses of “John Brown’s Body.” Mrs. Ayers, calm as ever, was eating with attention, as if it were her last meal. Sheba, finished, had put her head on the table and closed her eyes.
I got up and left.
I saw no other way. I knew it was wrong, unsafe and disloyal. I knew that I should trust to Mrs. Ayers to sort everything out. But I also knew that Pa was close. From the moment we had set foot on shore, from the moment I had begun to explain myself to the army, and heard about the hospital camp, I had begun to dread that my father was dying somewhere near by, and I was not there. It had been my intention from the first to find him as fast as possible, and I had been sidetracked, and now I would be punished for my neglect. I had come so far. I was so close. I could not stand to be held back by passivity and caution, by pats on the head and assurances that everything would be cleared up if I was patient. I had to go, even if it just meant walking and walking and walking until I found him. When I had left Miss Veda’s through that broken window, I had put certain things behind me for good. There was no point trying to jump back now. I had begun this adventure running through the streets of Philadelphia without thought or direction, and I would end it by doing the same on the streets of Louisville.
A drunken officer was beating on the door of the hotel, calling “Le’ me in, Sophie, le’ me in.” I opened the door and stepped over him when he fell down. Then, a moment of inspiration. His horse was tied to the rail outside. I took his gun from his holster, tucked it under my arm, heavy great thing that it was, then stepped to the rail and untied the horse. I put my foot in the stirrup and – how I did this without shooting myself I’ll never know – launched up into the saddle. The horse was a monster, far bigger than anything I had ever ridden – a blood mare, suitable for an officer. I didn’t even have to say “Get along.” I just squeezed my legs and the beast took off, with me holding the reins like I knew what I was doing, and the gun bouncing and jolting under my arm.